On Wuhan Youngsters' Attitudes Towards Wuhan Dialect Madarin And English

Language attitude reflects the social psychology. Attitudes toward a language/ dialect reveal much of people's perception and evaluation of the speakers of the language/dialect, the social status of the language/ dialect and the stereotypes towards the members of these varieties. Researches on language attitudes are not only of theoretical importance, but also of practical value, they can contribute to the understanding of the psychological characteristics of a people, or a community and furthermore, language planning and instruction.In China, language attitude researches so far, have been conducted mainly in Cantoneses-speaking community (such as Hongkong, Guangzhou), and in some minority nationalities community. The author conducted a study in Wuhan, situated in the central part of China to see whether people in the city, reputed as "Thoroughfare to Nine Provinces", hold distinct language attitude, and thus to demonstrate the link of people's language attitude to their values and beliefs , emotional reactions and tendency to behave of the language/dialect choices they make.The study focuses on the Wuhan Youngsters' attitudes towards Wuhan dialect, Mandarin and English. This thesis consists of five chapters. The first chapter begins with the purpose and value of the research, and then considers the nature of language attitudes and broad range of focuses.Chapter two firstly presents the main methods employed in language attitudes researches: the societal treatment, direct approaches, indirect approaches (matched-guise test) and semantic-differential scales and the problems with the approaches. Next is an overview of the extensive investigations and researches on language attitudes at home and abroad. Finally the objective and the hypotheses of the study are set out.Chapter Three is concerned with the MGT and its result. It was discussed from the dimensions of status and solidarity. The possible explanations of the results were also explored. The test was administered with high school and college students from Wuhan University of Technology and its attached high school, valid samples taken together (N=102). In the test, after listening to each speaker, the subjects wereencouraged to make guesses and rate each speaker they heard on 10 personality traits in a five-point scale. The higher the subjects score, the more favorable they evaluated on the guise. The 10 items chosen involved the three components (cognitive, affective and conative components) language attitude consists of and the two dimensions (social status and in-group solidarity) language attitude evaluates. In selecting subjects for the test, the stratified sampling approach is followed, considering the proportion of gender and level of education background, so as to find the differential language attitudes of the two variables.Chapter four analyzes the questionnaire and the result of it. The questionnaire was conducted as a supplement by the same subjects in the matched-guise experiment, It includes 1) subjects' personal background information: sex, age, educational level, and etc. 2)12 multiple choices asking for their conscious, overt evaluations on Wuhan dialect, Mandarin and English. 3) three incomplete sentences to be finished with the general evaluation on the three language varietiesChapter Five is the concluding part. The findings of the study can be summed up as follows: from the horizontal comparison, we can find that Wuhan youngsters rated Wuhan dialect higher on solidarity dimension than that on status dimension;Mandarin is rated similarly on both the status and solidarity dimensions, which is inconsistent with the results in previous researches; the rating of English is relatively low on solidarity dimension and significantly high on status dimension. But when compared with one another vertically, the three varieties were rated quite differently on the status dimension, but not so significantly on the solidarity dimension. Surprisingly, the scores Wuhan dialect received were slightly low than those of Mandarin and English, with an exception of th...