Contact-induced Changes In Cangzhou Dialect In The Context Of Urbanization

The unique language situation in China provides great convenience for the study of language/dialect contact. As the hot topic in sociolinguistic research, the study on the contact between regional dialects and Standard Chinese has caught the attention of many Chinese scholars. With the development of urbanization, increased mobility, and intensified exchange of information, studies on language/dialect contact cover a wider range now. The influence of Standard Chinese on dialects has become increasingly prominent, with diversified variations and changes in regional dialects.This current research tests the effectiveness of the theoretical framework proposed by Thomason (2003) by investigating contact-induced variations and changes in Cangzhou Dialect in typical sounds, lexical items and syntactic structures. Thirty-eight Cangzhou Dialect speakers are chosen who have different degrees of contact with Standard Chinese. Meanwhile the predictors of contact-induced language/dialect variations and changes are analyzed and the trend for dialect change is predicted.It is found that contact with Standard Chinese has brought about changes in all the three linguistic levels in Cangzhou Dialect. Specifically, in phonetics, the frequency of using dialectical initials and finals decreases as age decreases, the same case for the degree of borrowing of standard pronunciation. In lexical items, the rates of word recognition and use frequency of dialectical words decrease with the decreasing of age, and borrowing of standard terms is more frequent in young people than in the old. In syntactic structures, the usage of dialectical syntactic features becomes less obvious with the decreasing of age.It is also found that the variations and changes in Cangzhou Dialect in the three linguistic levels are closely related to its contact with Standard Chinese. Specifically, Cangzhou Dialect users tend to turn to standard forms when using sounds and lexical items with Universal Markedness, due to the difficulty of dialectal linguistic elements and language attitude. Integration of dialectal linguistic elements into the language system has an influence on use of dialects. Psychological features of language users also play a role in choosing which dialect/language to use in communication. The age and gender of language users affect dialect use greatly in that the dialectical features are more obvious in the old than in the young, and the male tend to preserve more dialectical features than the female.The attitude of language users towards Cangzhou Dialect also exert an influence on dialect use as language users holding positive attitude towards dialect tend to preserve more dialectical features and vice versa. In general, affected by linguistic and social factors, Cangzhou Dialect shows a trend of getting more similar with Standard Chinese, and such a trend will continue.The findings have proved the effectiveness of the theoretical framework by Thomason (2003). The framework can not only explain contact-induced variations and changes in Indo-European language families, but is also effective in accounting for the contact situation in Sino-Tibetan language families.