Abstract Nowadays, in the times of globalization, studying contacts of cultures is becoming more and more actual. Taking into consideration the multinational character of our country, the problem of nations’ relations, their peaceful co-existence and mutual understanding takes one of the central places in the social medium functioning. This article reveals the results of a vast associative experiment carried out in different parts of Russia: Tatarstan and Komi Republic. The contact of Russian and Tatar cultures is studied on the basis of the Russian and the Tatar languages. To define the role of the language in the image of the world the authors studied the linguistic consciousness of the representatives of the Komi nation who don’t know their native language and speak only Russian. To achieve the aim of the research the method of semantic gestalt was used. The analysis showed that it is the language that plays the most important role in the image of the world, but not belonging to a certain nation. Ethnic self-consciousness (i.e. a person understands that he belongs to a certain ethnic community) gives place to the language when the image of the world is concerned. Thus, the use of the common language (Russian) allows to minimize the possible conflicts between the representatives of different nations living on the territory of Russia and this makes the problem acute.