Language Change In Minority Area In The Background Of Population Migration:

Since the People's Republic of China was founded,standard mandarin Putonghua has been promoted by Putonghua policy and is widely used because of mass migration in China.But with the social and economic development,China puts higher requirements on the national language ability,and requires a more harmonious language life and a national multilingual talent pool.However,the researchers observe that people's language uses tend to converge towards Putonghua in the real life,and the language diversity appears a decreasing trend.Therefore,this research investigates and studies the language uses and changes among population in Guilin in order to find the factors affecting language changes and the interaction mechanism between changes and factors,and try to give some enlightenment and suggestions for language policy formulating.The main research questions of this study are:in the background of population migration,what kind of language changes have occurred in the local population and in the immigrant population?What factors contribute to these language changes?How do these factors contribute to these language changes?Starting from language choice,by using basic theories of sociolinguistics,language policy and language planning theory,and language ecology to construct a theoretical frame work,quantitative and qualitative research methods were jointly used to analyze the data from questionnaire survey,in-depth interview and observation.Factor analysis,non-parametric test and structural equation path analysis were adopted to make quantitative data analysis,and the theoretical technology of change in progress was adopted to infer the language change in the future.Questionnaire survey was conducted through snowball sampling on the Internet,and stratified paper questionnaire survey was conducted in six local middle schools and high schools in Guilin city.A total of 622 effective data of permanent residents in Guilin city were obtained.Semi-structured interviews with 10 immigrants and 11 local people in different age groups and structured interviews with 8 young people and teenagers through the Internet were conducted.Language uses of one local family and one immigrant family were observed and analyzed.The results of this study were obtained through analysis of data from questionnaire survey,interview and observation.The main findings of this study are as follows:1.On the whole,there is a convergence of language use between the two types of population,but there are differences in language use between different ages and different types of population in situations closely related to personal life.2.In most situations,diachronic language changes converge to Putonghua.The family domain has lost the advantageous position of inheriting the dialect,only in the community life domain and the friend domain,the dialect still maintains certain vigor.3.Prediction of language development trend is,if we do not pay attention to harmonizing the relationship between standard mandarin and dialects,in the next two or three generations,or even sooner,dialects in the city will disappear,all of cities are dominated by standard mandarin Putonghua alone.4.Five impact factors of language use in permanent residents in Guilin city were found:language value factor,language attitude factor,language identity factor,language education factor and language policy factor.5.The relationship between the impact factors and language use,and the influence path were found in different domain.In most domains and individual language use,such as in public life domain,work domain,family domain,education domain and individual language use,the important language impact factors are language attitude,language use in education domain,language identity and language policy.In the family domain,the important language impact factors are:language use in education domain,language attitude,personal language use.In the community life domain and the friend domain,the important language impact factors are:language value,language use in education domain,language attitude.Besides,the language use in education domain and individual language use play important roles as intermediate variables in the process of the influence of the above factors on language uses in each language domain.Based on the research results,this dissertation proposes specific suggestions on language management of domains and language policies on different levels.The language management on domains includes,people should be encouraged to insist on speaking Putonghua in the working places and public places,should be encouraged to speak both Putonghua and a dialect or a minority language in family,and should be encouraged to inherit dialects and minority languages in the community life and in communications with friends.Language policies on different levels are,at the state government level,a language belief that various languages can be united as a whole and can develop harmoniously in China should be constructed;at the local government level,a language management that everyone speaks Putonghua and everybody inherits a dialect or a minority language should be implemented;and at the individual level,the language practice that everybody can speak 1+N languages should be carried out.The findings of this study enrich the research methods and ideas of language change and provide a new theoretical framework for the research of language policy related to real language life.Finally,the innovation and research limitations of this dissertation are described,and the future of the research in this field is prospected.