A Study On Sucheng Migrant Workers's Language Situation

This thesis mainly explores the language abilities, language uses and language attitudes of Sucheng migrant workers and investigates their language situation with sociolinguistics methods, such as questionnaire investigation, disguised observation, interview method and so on. It also finds some elements which affect their language use and attitudes.With questionnaire investigation of 175 migrant workers and interviews of 16 subjects, the author has obtained the language division from the area and classification points. In hometown, these migrant workers mainly speak their own dialects, and the use of Putonghua is very rare, however, they use Putonghua more rather than dialects out of hometown. Dialects are used very often when communicating with family members no matter in hometown or not, while Putonghua is used more in public places. For language attitudes, the comprehensive evaluation of Putonghua is highest. However, the affection evaluation of dialects is higher than Putonghua. These results could prove that the new generation of migrant workers will play an important role in preserving dialects,The thesis consists of five chapters.Chapter One is an introduction to the study, including the origin, background and the significance of the research. It further introduces related theories previous research findings.Chapter Two is the methodology adopted in our study. The participants, research questions and the methods are presented in this chapter. Finally, all the data collected are analyzed.Chapter Three discusses language use of migrant workers. Based on the analysis of their language competence, the author describes the change of language use before and after work outside. Some factors that influence the use of language are analyzed and some reasons are given with the help on interview and observation. In Chapter Four, the author talks about the language attitude of migrant workers. Through the emotional, functional and status evaluation of the mandarin, hometown dialect and the dialect of their work place, and the analysis of "dialectal programs" and "views on language teaching", the author investigates migrant workers'language attitude and the development of dialect in the future.The conclusions are presented in Chapter Five. The author compares the results with existing research findings, finds the different language situation between migrant workers in different areas, and predicts their language development.