| Dialect island, as a special kind of language form, can be taken as an excellent window for us to observe language contact and language development. This paper describes in detail the language situation and language life of the mandarin islands in Anji County, Zhejiang Province. It also investigates the dialect islands' developmental trace and their relationships with other dialects around them, and discusses the rules of language contact and change accordingly. This paper consists of five chapters.Chapter One is the introduction.Firstly, the different definitions of dialect island in the academical circle are introduced and the concept of dialect island is specified in a broad sense in this paper. By comparing these dialect islands with Wu dialects and Mandarin, we conclude that these dialect islands belong to mandarin. To make sure that this paper be built on the rock, we find out the source dialects of them by studying the sources of migrants and language features.Secondly, the aim, methods and materials of this paper are explained.Thirdly, the author introduces the history, geography, transportation and historical migration activities of Anji County. Because the migration after the Taiping Tianguo (太平天国) War played a decisive role in the distribution of population and dialects in today's Anji, the last part of this chapter gives us a whole picture of population declining, migration and its sources after the War.Chapter two introduces the languge situation and language life in Anji County.Firstly, the paper describes the dialectal distribution in Anji County, including the native dialect of Anji (a land of Wu dialects) and other dialects such as mandarin, Taizhou dialect, Shaoxing dialect, Ningbo dialect, Wenzhou dialect, and Shehua, etc. And Anji County is a typical area of multi-dialectal contacting where a large quantity of dialects spoken by many people as their mother tongues distribute crossly.Secondly, by comparing the linguistic features of three mandarin islands including Henan dialect, Anqing dialect, and Hubei dialect, the paper analyzes their similarities and differences.Thirdly, taking Ancheng Town as an example, the paper makes a case study of the language life of the dialect islands by questionnaire as well as interview, and points out that code contact and code switching in a multi-dialectal area has its own characteristics.Chapter three studies the language contact and language change of the mandarin islands in Anji.The author argues that there are two different kinds of contact in dialect Hands: internal contact and external contact. The former only takes place in a dialect island with several sources, while the later can be found in all dialect islands. Based on this argument, the paper at first analyzes the process of language contact and language mixing in Henan dialect island, and concludes that Henan dialect island is the mixture of Henan dialects spoken by migrants from Xinyang, Henan Province. Guangshan dialect is the basis of dialect mixing as it shares the mostfeatures with Henan dialect island.The paper also makes multi-comparisons between dialect islands and surrounding dialects, between dialect islands and source dialects, and also between dialect islands themselves, then summarizes several kinds of changes resulting from external contact of dialect islands: the same change in different dialect island, the same change in dialect island and its source dialect, and conservation and innovation of dialect island, etc.Chapter four aims to give a preliminary discussion on the rules of language change found in mandarin islands.The paper points out that sound changes in dialect island take place in the way of lexical diffusion, but not all of them can be found with three stages : unchanged, changing and changed. Just because of this, we can guess unknown information from the known, and reconstruct the whole sequence of lexical diffusion. The paper also finds a new kind of lexical diffusion phenomenon named "diffusion chase", which can only be found in areas whe...
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