ANIMAL-RELATED PROVERBS AND IDIOMS AS REFLECTIONS OF NATIONAL IDENTITY: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF ENGLISH AND UZBEK

Abstract

This article explores animal-related proverbs and idioms in English and Uzbek as linguistic units reflecting national identity, cultural memory, and value systems. Proverbs and idioms are widely recognized in linguistic scholarship as fixed expressions that preserve collective experience, transmit social evaluation, and embody culturally significant meanings. In both English and Uzbek, animal imagery serves as an important symbolic code through which speakers characterize human behavior, social roles, morality, intelligence, diligence, hypocrisy, danger, and loyalty. The purpose of the study is to identify the semantic, cultural, and evaluative functions of animal-related proverbs and idioms in the two languages and to determine how they reflect national identity. The research is based on comparative, descriptive, semantic, and linguocultural methods. The analysis demonstrates that English and Uzbek share a number of universal symbolic associations, such as the fox as a marker of cunning or the wolf as a marker of danger, yet they also differ in their dominant cultural emphases. English phraseology more often foregrounds individual behavior, practical wisdom, and interpersonal judgment, whereas Uzbek paremias more visibly encode collective values, social reputation, endurance, kinship orientation, and the cultural prestige of the horse and caravan imagery. The findings confirm that animal-related phraseology is not only a lexical or stylistic phenomenon but also an important means of verbalizing national worldview.