Speech etiquette in Kyrgyz and English linguo-cultures

The study aimed to identify specific features of speech etiquette in Kyrgyz and English linguo-cultures through a comparative analysis of means of expressing communicative distance. The methodological framework combined corpus analysis, contextual-interpretative analysis of literary texts, and a functional-grammatical description of normative models. It was established that the repertoire of basic etiquette acts in both linguo-cultures included greeting, farewell, gratitude, apology, request, and congratulation; however, their distribution and structural organisation differed. Kyrgyz communication is characterised by greater formulaic elaboration and the inclusion of well-wishing components, whereas English tends toward compactness and the universalisation of clichés. Kyrgyz systematically encodes social distance through the pronominal opposition sen/siz and extensive use of kinship nominations, whereas English conveys distance primarily through titulature and forms of address, in the absence of pronominal differentiation. English politeness strategies rely predominantly on modal and conditional constructions, whereas Kyrgyz relies on morphological forms of respect and mitigating particles. The study found that the formal written register in both linguo-cultures is characterised by a high degree of standardisation, whereas the neutral register allows for reduced structural components and greater variability in formulae. The study's practical significance lies in the possibility of using its results to develop teaching materials for Kyrgyz and English, to practise translating etiquette formulae, and to teach the norms of oral and written intercultural communication.