EN
The paper discusses a method for discovering important concepts of culture through the process of scrutinizing the most numerous sets of synonyms (which are treated as names of entrenched and salient concepts of the given language’s culture), and subsequently combining them in a set of cultural concept networks. The author focuses on the evolution of cultural concepts and the linguistic material from 19th and 20th c. dictionaries of synonyms, and the Polish version of WordNet which served as the base for the analysis. The paper shows the evolution of some of the concepts of culture established in the 19th c. and still vivid in present day discourse of collective identity.