A Survey Of Language Attitudes And Language Use In The Macanese Community

The dramatic change of official language is one of the issues left to post-colonial regions.Mandarin Chinese has become an official language after the Macau's handover to China,although it remains unfamiliar to a part of the domestic people. On the other hand, the popularityof Cantonese makes Mandarin only a "partial" second language. Let the group of people whoregard Mandarin as such a partial second language be our research target, it's pragmatically andacademically valuable to understand their evaluation of the various languages.In this thesis, we study the language attitudes and language use of the Macanese, throughpoll and interview. The Macanese people who contributed in our sample survey were of differentgenders, education levels and ages. Based on the statistics and comparisons upon the collecteddata, we discuss and analyze the positions and values of the local major languages (Portuguese,Cantonese Chinese, English and Mandarin Chinese) in the point of view of this particular groupof people. We also present our view on the various causes of these analytical results.Our study shows that the Macanese, who are a group of people formed under a specificsocial historical background, have their specific language attitudes and language use. Thesephenomena can and must be explained under the specific social historical background.