An Investigation On Language Use Of Jishou Miao Nationality

In the great context of globalization and urbanization, the exchanges among different countries and different nationalities in the world are becoming more and more frequent, thus the contacts between various languages or varieties are accordingly increasing. All the multinational countries in the world are inevitably facing the issue of bilingualism or multilingualism. In view of economic interests, social motivation and status awareness, minority languages are threatened by strong languages. With the development of economy and culture, minority nationalities in our country have an increasing need for Han language. Jishou city, which is the provincial city of Xiangxi Autonomous Prefecture of Tujia and Miao Nationalities, is the habitation of Miao nationality. Influenced by the powerful Han language, Miao people in Jishou shift to Han language and Miao language has a decline tendency. Language is the carrier of culture, and to a large extent the diversity of the world's civilization is embodied in the world's linguistic diversity. Therefore, the survival of minority languages arouses many scholars'concern.This research, which is guided by bilingualism study of sociolinguistics, adopts the sociolinguistic research approaches of observation and questionnaire to explore the language use of Jishou Miao nationality. The investigator, as a member of Jishou Miao nationality, adopts participant observation to document Miao language intergenerational transmission and make qualitative analysis. As a supplement to the participant observation, a questionnaire is conducted to 90 informants with various occupation, education background, age and place of residence, etc. The data is processed with SPSS (13.0) and EXCEL (2000) to quantitatively analyze the language situation of Miao nationality in Jishou and some related social variables.It is found in the research that Miao people have a natural passion with their ethnic language and they regard Miao language as a vital means to confirm solidarity and in-group identity. Though, to some extent, Miao language is still of vitality, Miao language unavoidably has a decline tendency and Miao nationality in Jishou has become a bilingual and multilingual community in which Han language is gradually mastered as their second language and is used in wider and wider scope. As for the intergenerational language transmission, the younger generation is more likely to shift to Han language than the older generation. The language use of Jishou Miao nationality varies with respect to different occasions, different education background, different gender and different ages. Miao language and Han language are employed in complementary distribution across different situations, that is, Miao language is mainly used in home domain and Han language in public domains. Miao people's positive attitude towards Han language accelerates the shift from Miao language to Han language. With the development of ethnic education, Miao people's proficiency in Han Chinese keeps improving. In addition, other factors such as powerful language, economic pattern, mixed marriage and no vulgate writing system will affect the use of Miao language. There exists an increasing trend that Miao people shift to Han language and even some of them transfer to Han language. Any kind of ethnic languages is loaded with excellent ethnic culture. To abandon one's own ethnic language is in a sense to give up a kind of outstanding ethnic culture. Therefore, when making great efforts to popularize national lingua franca, the nation should also strengthen the maintenance of minority languages.The result of this research helps treat language situation of minority nationality and influences the policy making of the government and the implementation of language policy.Due to the limitations of the present study, the findings and conclusion of this thesis are preliminary, which requires further research at a more general level.