The key problems of modern linguistics are the establishment and description of the relationship between the semantic foundations of the language, the national mentality, and the culture of a particular ethnic group. At this point, ethnospecific vocabulary is of great interest to linguists, as well as for representatives of cultural studies, sociology, and ethnography. In this regard, this article is aimed to identify the features of national currency nominations that have a number of quantitative and qualitative characteristics in the German language, which is manifested at the level of frequency of use, as well as in terms of combinability at the level of syntagmatics. The methodological basis of the study were the main provisions of the theory of cognitive linguistics and the use of corpus technologies in the analysis of lexical units. The author compared data from paremiographic sources with data from the German language corpus "Digitales Wrterbuch der deutschen Sprache" (DWDS) on ethnospecific lexical units with subsequent identification of cognitive-discursive features of the analyzed group of lexemes. The obtained data can be taken into account when describing the mechanisms of formation and maintenance of national identity, translation of norms and values in the German-speaking ethnocultural society.