Study On Hui Nation's Language Use In Kaifeng From The Angle Of Sociolinguistics

Based on the survey of language variation of Chinese of Hui Nation's people in Shunhe District, Kaifeng, Henan Province, and with a review of sociolinguistics, this thesis puts forward a tentative idea to explain these varieties caused by various typical social factors. With the methods of quantitative and qualitative study, which are popular in linguistics research area, the investigators got the frequencies of the use of words and phrases from Hui's ancestors'native languages in their utterances. Analysis of corpus and replies to questionnaire have been adopted as the way to speculate the attitude towards ethnic elements and nationalities of Hui Nation's people who are divided into several primary groups by their sex, age, stratum and profession in this thesis. Afterwards summarize and analyze some distinctive phenomena appeared in language use of Hui ethnic group in Shunhe District with the guide of theories in national psychology, historical context and persistent influence from Isam. Additionally, some basic theories in linguistics have been employed to illustrate the cause and formation of varieties in Hui Nation's Chinese, such as language contact, logogram, code switching and mixing, etc.The Hui ethnic group had experienced a 3-step evolvement procedure in language use in hundreds of years after they settled in China, i.e, changed from multilingualism to bilingualism, and then to single-language. Owing to the common surroundings and shared religion, the ancestors of Hui Nation who were at the multilingualism assembled gradually into an original multisource community, in spite of fact that they had dissimilarities in native languages which less than the unlikeness laid between their culture and Chinese culture or language. It is the gap between traditional cultures of Western and Eastern Asia that waken the cohesive force and feeling of identity in the multisource community of Hui Nation's ancestors and then accelerate them to take the path of forming a national community, with an evident manifestation is the common national language.After the code switch, the Hui Nation's people had devoted their emotion to the newly-formed nation common language, which gradually became a mirror of Hui Nation's cultural psychology with sharp brand of their own. As a result of the instinctive behavior of maintaining their native culture that derived from Islamic world, the people of Hui Nation introspected their traditional cultures to find the specialties which can be emphasized or publicized to the exterior native Chinese-speaking community. One of the expressions of such preservation to native national culture was the particular words of Hui Nation's ancestors'various native languages. Specifically speaking, they were lexicon which used in the multilingualism period and shift in both emotive and semantic meaning.At present, the speech act of Hui Nation's people in China can be classified as speech in secular life and in religious ceremony, of which the former exists as a reflection of Hui's citizenship whereas the latter reflects the identity of Moslem; both identities well integrate in a self-regulating homeostasis, which manifest as the high frequency of words of Hui's multisource native languages and few Mosque speeches in sermon of imam. There has been some decrease in frequency and nationality of words in Hui's native languages, especially of the greetings or certain proper words, when the speakers communicate with their clansmen. Moreover, when the Hui talk with a Han in daily occasions, the Hui would minimize the degree of nationality in his speech, without referring any words of his ancestors'native languages.This thesis is carried through a language survey of the use of Chinese in Hui Nation's ethnic group in Shunhe District, Kaifeng. By interviewing respondents who had been divided into four categories by their sex, age, stratum and profession to investigate the language variation appeared in their spoken Chinese. The investigations have shown that there exist qualitative differences in language use between Hui and Han; they lie among different groups within Hui Nation's society as well, and manifest in forms of phonetic, vocabulary and grammar, but the most outstanding difference lies in vocabulary. From the relationship of culture and language, we might take the acceptance or repellence of certain words, usually the ones from other cultural community as a mirror of cultural psychology. In this thesis, many language variations of Hui Nation's Chinese recorded in survey have been listed, and the cause of such linguistic phenomena have been analyzed with some consideration of other factors like ethnic group, religion, culture contact and so on.