The anthropocentric paradigm of modern linguistics is also reflected in phraseology, and the “man in language” is revealed in a special way within the expressions that contain various somatic concepts. As part of the fundamental and oldest lexical fund, somatic idioms both deposit and mirror the correlation between body and cognition, the physical, and the metaphysical. Since the process of cognition is based on embodied experience, the subject of the research are idioms with the component tongue and ear, sensory organs by means of which the process of cognition is activated, but which also reflect the basic functions of language – communication and socialization. Speech and hearing are complementary, inseparable, and extremely important features of the human biological and social dimension. The analysis of somatic idioms in Croatian, English and German was carried out at the level of motivation, semantic-conceptual analysis, functional and formal equivalence, etymology, and includes lexicographic treatment of the chosen corpora. The theoretical-methodological framework of contrastive analysis has been expanded, in certain research phases, with cultural and cognitive-linguistic assumptions of processing phraseological material, excerpted from general and phraseological monolingual and bilingual dictionaries and relevant network databases. This approach to the analysis of phraseological material has shown that the fundamental source of motivation of somatic idioms with the components tongue and ear are cultural models. The conventional knowledge related to somatic concepts tongue and ear is extended with other cultural models, and in some examples elaborated by rhetorical devices and cognitive mechanisms of conceptual metaphor and metonymy. The conceptual structure of somatic phraseology has also shown anthropocentric properties since lexicalized concepts of extralinguistic reality are almost entirely related to man. In addition to basic concepts of speech and hearing, somatic phrases also reflect human 243 characteristics and states, mental processes, skills and abilities, interpersonal relationships, emotions and moods and, consequently, human appearance. Contrastive analysis of somatic idioms with the components tongue and ear has confirmed the premise of the existence of common features within the classification of extralinguistic reality through somatic phraseology of Croatian, English, and German. The common semanticconceptual basis is conditioned primarily by universal and fundamental functional features of somatic concepts, such as speech and hearing, while the existence of culturally specific expressions, in which the somatic component most often represents a part of the human body as the bearer of cultural information, speaks in favour of linguistic relativism. The research represents a contribution to previous comparative phraseological research since no systematic contrastive analysis of somatic phrases within the three phraseological traditions has been conducted so far