Geographical And Social Distribution Of Wuhan Dialect

Starting with general and special concept of dialect, the dissertation introduces the concept of social dialect which is discussed in both sociolinguistics and urban dialectology. Socioliguistics studies language, linguistic variation, linguistic features and correlationship between language and social factors of its speaker.As an important city of Huazhong Area, Wuhan plays an important role in the spread of Pu long Hua by the way how language is applied and distributed. Linguistic features and way of its distribution in Wuhan city is described in this dissertation. The language distribution in Wuchan, Hankou and Hanyang reflects its typical downtown features in phonetics, vocabulary and syntax. How Wuhan dialect is distributed in Qinshan district reflects the result of a mixture between Wuhan dialect and other varieties of Chinese, giving Wuhan dialect a special style in this district. Distribution of Wuhan dialect in Hongshan district and bilingualism in this district make application of language most complicated in Hongshan district. Apart from that, social distribution of dialect can be studied in its change condition from the pronunciations of some words and way of expressions, all of which reflect how Mandarin Chinese is spread and how language is standardized in this city. With the help of questionnaires and analysis of these questionnaires, the dissertation describes the distribution of Wuhan dialect and its standard variety and how it is correlated to some social factors like age, gender, education, backgrounds etc. Some conclusions have been drawn that language distribution is closely related to age, gender and education. Meantime, some hypotheses have been put forward like: it is possible that secondary education is the bottom limit for language standardization. As for language planning, it is said in the dissertation that corpus planning is more an important task. Language attitude and existing standardization degree play their parts. However, a misunderstanding should be avoided. Last, suggested proposals have been put forward so as to better standardize Wuhan language.Hope all the studies and descriptions about Wuhan dialect will be helpful in Wuhan language normalization.