Mongolian Students' Language Use And Language Attitudes--A Case Study Of Mongolian Preparatory College Students In Huhhot Universities

Various researches and studies have been conducted on language attitude and Mongolian in recent years. Most empirical researches have been undertaken about attitude towards language in SLA and FLL. And various studies have been conducted on Mongolian language's history, language change, interior linguistic elements, present situation as well as Mongolian people's language use and language shift. Although Mongolian has received considerable attention, to date, very little research has been done on attitude towards Mongolian from Mongolian preparatory college students'point of view and few published studies have been concerned with Mongolian from this aspect. Thus this study is one of the first to examine Mongolian preparatory college students' attitudes towards their mother language and Chinese.This research is a quantitative empirical study with the help of a survey. It is a representative sampling on the basis of the demographical variables regarding personal backgrounds, language environments and language abilities. The survey has been conducted among Mongolian preparatory college students in the colleges or universities in Huhhot to collect information for the attitudes towards their mother language, to summarize their attitude and examine attitude changes in the university years when they experience much more exposure to Chinese, the more dominant language in the society, and to analyze the factors contributing to the attitude and its changes with the SPSS statistical data analysis system.This thesis concludes that most students have a very positive attitude towards their mother language Mongolian and hope to maintain its vitality. Furthermore, they have a very positive attitude towards bilingualism and prefer a combined use of Mongolian and Chinese in social communication to act as members of the national language community. And this thesis shows that the students'language attitudes are related to their personal backgrounds, language environments and language abilities and that there are attitudinal differences in evaluation on Mongolian and Chinese and in attitudes to bilingualism among the three groups of research subjects. Hopefully, this thesis can make a contribution to research on Mongolian from a sociolinguistic perspective.