Contrastive Study Of The Spread Of English And Chinese

Language spread is always closely related with social changes.The spread of English has produced a new sociolinguistic reality, by threatening to take over important functions from other major languages,and by furthering language shift. And recently, China's dramatic rise to near superpower status and its telling effects politically, economically and culturally are driving people's interest to learn the Chinese language.Why a language becomes a global language has something to do with the number of people who speak it, but it has much more to do with who those speakers are.The recent world-wide spread of English and Chinese has raised not just concern among speakers of other languages,but controversy among sociolinguists.In order to understand this new sociolinguistic reality, this thesis has attempted to make a contrastive study of the spread of English and Chinese.It aims at finding answers of the following questions.Firstly, what are the differences and similarities in the history of the spread of English and Chinese? Secondly, what are the differences and similarities in the modes of the spread of English and Chinese? Thirdly, what are the differences and similarities in the effects of the spread of English and Chinese? Fourthly, does the criticism about English linguistic imperialism make sense? Fifthly, does the criticism about Chinese culture infiltration make sense? Finally, what can we do in the new sociolinguistic reality produced by the spread of English-the global language?...