In the context of the modern scientific paradigm of linguistics, the linguoculturological approach to the study of linguistic units is becoming more and more relevant. Proverbs occupy a special place as accumulators of cultural values and the centuries-old experience of a certain ethnic group. They form an important part of the communicative funds of ethnic groups (in particular, Russian and Mari), reflect the specifics of their thinking, and the national cultural semantics. This article traces and describes the evolution of the linguistic world-image of Russian and Mari linguocultures, considers the problem of creating stereotypical views about national culture and the features of ethnic mentality. The purpose of this research is to consider the basic components and features of verbalization of the lexical units "um" in Russian and "ush" in the Mari language and to give their contrastive description as fragments of ethnolinguo-cultural world-image. To this end, we carried out a thorough analysis of the definitions of wellknown explanatory dictionaries that represent the constant mental unit "um/ush" in the context of proverbs as ethnoculturally marked. The study is based on dictionaries and collections of proverbs and sayings of the Russian and Mari languages, the choice of which was determined by the objectives of the study and the popularity of these publications. The corpus of the Russian paroemiological material consists of about 1500 paroemias, in the Mari language, it includes about 400 paroemias. The comparative analysis method allowed us to determine ethnocultural similarities and differences of the "um/ush" phenomenon among the representatives of two different language families. By comparing lexicographic interpretations with these peoples' naive stereotypical representations of "mind", mirrored by their paroemiosphere, where the semantic boundaries of the lexical units "um / ush" expand, we have come to the conclusion that the languages under study are characterized by a commonality of fundamental values, while the differences are reflected in nuances of expression, distribution, and combinatorics of the norms.