Beijing Mandarin Monosyllabic Different Words Of Social Stratification

Taking the "change-in-use" view, guided by sociolinguistics language variety theory, the paper studies how speaker's age, sex, education level and vocation affect language use and language attitude in Beijing, how the monosyllables with variant pronunciations are used among Beijing people. It is a case study on language use research, language variety research and language development research.Chapter one focuses on research content, research purpose, and research steps. It also reviews Beijing dialect research from sociolinguistics view and defines the concepts.The research content include two parts:the first is the investigation on the use of Mandarin Chinese, Beijing dialect, and the monosyllables with variant pronunciations in Beijing dialect; the second part is the investigation on the attitude toward Beijing dialect and Mandarin Chinese in Beijing. Based on those field investigations, the research hopes to achieve its purpose to analyze the stream of language variety and language development in Beijing. Chapter one also describes the research steps, which include selecting subjects, designing Questionnaire and investigating data.Defines the concepts:such as Beijing dialect, Mandarin Chinese, monosyllable and variant pronunciation. In this paper, "variant pronunciations" specifies to variant pronunciations with the same meaning. That is to say, the same term of meaning has different pronunciations in different context:one is Mandarin Chinese pronunciation, the other is Beijing dialect pronunciation.Chapter two investigates the use and the attitude of Beijing dialect and Mandarin Chinese. The investigation shows that the subjects prefer Mandarin Chinese to Beijing dialect with their spouses, Beijing dialect to Mandarin Chinese with their parents, both Beijing dialect and Mandarin Chinese with their sons or daughters. As Mandarin Chinese is the official dialect, most subjects hope it booms over the country. While, most subjects hope Beijing dialect which is a regional dialect booms in Beijing.Chapter three surveys the use of monosyllable with variant pronunciation in Beijing dialect. It reveals that the number of monosyllable with variant pronunciations in Beijing dialect is getting fewer and fewer. The Beijing dialect pronunciations of hose monosyllables with variant pronunciations which have the similar pronunciations in Mandarin Chinese and Beijing dialect are becoming weak.Chapter four studies how speakers'age, sex, education level and vocation affect their use of monosyllable with variant pronunciations in Beijing dialect. The result shows that the speakers'age, sex and education level all have significant relations with their use of monosyllable with variant pronunciations in Beijing dialect.The subjects whose age between 16 and 55 prefer Mandarin Chinese while those whose age fewer than 15 or above 56 prefer Beijing dialect; the female subjects prefer Mandarin Chinese while the male subjects prefer Beijing dialect; the subjects who obtain college education or more than college education prefer Mandarin Chinese while those who don't obtain college education prefer Beijing dialect.The research also finds that vocation has a weak relation with the use of monosyllable with variant pronunciations in Beijing dialect. Vocation and education level together affect the use of monosyllable with variant pronunciations in Beijing dialect. The subjects with the same vocation obtain higher education level, the more frequencies they speak Mandarin Chinese, vice versa.Chapter five summarizes the present study, points out the existed problems for further research.