A Study On The Status Quo Of The Mother Tongue Of The Young People Of The Minorities In The North

Along with the development of modernization,information integration and knowledge economy,endangered language has become a worldwide problem.China is also confronted with this problem.As a multi-ethnic country,China has rich language resources.Language,the carrier of culture,is significant to a nationality.With the extinct of a language,the culture along with it will disappear,so it is essential for us to strengthen the maintenance and protection of endangered languages.With the development of China and the construction of a moderately prosperous society in all aspects,ethnic areas has become the focus and seized the great chance to alter the blocked,unenlightened and undeveloped situation.Accompanied with the development of ethnic areas,some negative effects arise,language being the first to be affected.Because of the communication between different ethnics,language contact has become a common phenomenon,which will lead to language competition.The language which is used by less population and has no writing system may be weakened because of limited users and transmission;thus,diglossia,multilingualism or language shift turn up.At present,those minorities with less population mainly voluntarily shift to speak Mandarin Chinese,but hidden problems behind the language shift should be noticed.Language shift in the long term will lead to the unsustainable inheritance of heritage language,even weaken ethnic consciousness and cultural loss.In some cases,it may also cause social problems which will do no good to the harmony between different ethnics and social stability.As a result,the maintenance and protection of minority heritage language counts for a lot.In this context,the researcher dedicated to the study on heritage language maintenance of the minority with less population from the aspect of status quo of the adolescents heritage language maintenance.This thesis consists of three parts.Part ? includes introduction,chapters 1 and 2.Introduction and chapter 1 not only review the researches relevant to heritage language maintenance,but also presents the detained investigation process and the background information of investigated minorities' heritage language maintenance.Chapter 2 mainly introduces the overall language usage of SALAR,EWENKI and DAUR(referred to as three minorities below).Part ? is composed of chapters 3,4 and 5.This part aims to inspect the status quo of the adolescents' heritage language maintenance from three dimensions:individual,family and community.Part ?comprises chapters 6 and 7,analyzing how the adolescents' heritage language maintenance develops,predicting the tendency and putting forward solutions.The details are as follows.INTRODUCTION talks about the origin and significance of the thesis at the beginning,then reviews the researches relevant to the heritage language maintenance in detail,after which comes the interpretation of research thoughts,methodology,objects and contents.Chapter 1 firstly introduces the choice of research subjects and the investigation site,the investigation process and investigation respondents,then briefly presents the specific background information of the three minorities:brief introduction of three minorities,current language use situation,information of the investigation areas and investigation sites.Chapter 2 describes and compares the status quo of three minorities'language use.The current language use situation is investigated from three aspects:heritage language use,diglossia,multilingualism,and language shift.The status quo of language use can reflect the situation of the adolescents,heritage language maintenance.Chapter 3 inspects the status quo of the adolescents' her tage language maintenance from individual dimension.This chapter describes the currents situation of the adolescents' heritage language maintenance from three aspects:heritage language acquisition,heritage language performance,attitude towards heritage language maintenance.The comparison of the three minorities shows that heritage language maintenance situation of SALAR in Hualong County is good,DAUR in Meris weakened,EWENKI in Ewenki Banner better than DAUR in Meris.Chapter 4 investigates the status quo of the adolescents' heritage language maintenance from family dimension.This chapter analyzes the currents situation of the adolescents' heritage language maintenance from three aspects:family size,family ethnic composition and education background of family members.Chapter 5 surveys the status quo of the adolescents' heritage language maintenance from community dimension.This chapter started with the status quo of heritage language maintenance from the usage of heritage language in different occasions,then analyzes how the usages of heritage language in homogeneous and heterogeneous community network affect heritage language maintenance.At the end,the effects of ethnic composition and inter-ethnic relationship in community network are discussed.Chapter 6 is about what causes the status quo of heritage language maintenance the adolescents from minorities with less population.The main causes include ethnic social environment,ethnic social elements,ethnic consciousness,etc.Ethnic social environment consists of language environment,living environment,developing environment,etc.Ethnic social elements such as modes of production,religion and education also play an important role in the adolescents' heritage language maintenance.Moreover,the adolescents is the main force of heritage language maintenance.Their ethnic consciousness,language emotion,language concepts,family concept and marriage concept also affect their heritage language maintenance.Chapter 7 predicts the tendency of heritage language maintenance of the adolescents from minorities with less population and puts forward some solutions.Based on the status quo,the research predicts the tendency of heritage language maintenance of the adolescents from minorities with less population:the popularization of Mandarin Chinese weakens heritage language maintenance;the deficiency of heritage language education prevents the transmission of heritage language;the backwardness of bilingual education prevents the transmission of heritage language;the adolescents' attitude towards heritage language maintenance cannot agree with their behavior.Then according to the status quo,the researcher puts forward several solutions.Heritage language maintenance needs support from individuals,family and community.The solutions are as follows.One solution is to bring in guiding and incentive strategy.It is necessary for the government to issue certain policies in order to encourage heritage language maintenance.Heritage language maintenance also needs social attention and support from ethnic minorities.Another is to introduce monitoring,developing and protecting strategies.In order to maintain and protect heritage language,it is vital to monitor,develop and protect the language resource of ethnic minorities with less population.The last one is to adopt promotion and development strategies.Cultural transmission,economic development and education can promote the heritage language maintenance of ethnic minorities with less population.