The provisions introduced in the Constitution of the Russian Federation (paragraph 1 of Article 68 and paragraph 2 of Article 69) indicate that the transition from the ethnocultural paradigm of language policy to the national-functional paradigm, which has become the reality of the language situation in Russia, has finally become reflected in institutional discourse. Nevertheless, a number of issues remain related to the problems of cultural and linguistic capital and the national and linguistic identity of citizens whose mother languages are the languages of the peoples of the Russian Federation. The article examines the relationship of national identity with traditional ethnic languages and concludes that the concept of «native language», which dominates in domestic sociolinguistics, is not clear enough. In the current language situation, native speakers make a conscious choice in favor of communicatively strong languages for use and study. Their intuitive choice is confirmed by objective quantitative analysis using a language weight calculator.