Study Of People's Attitude Towards English Loan Words In Chinese

Language borrowing is a widespread sociolinguistic phenomenon in the development of a language which is brought about by language contact. It is one of the most significant ways of acquiring new words and enriching the vocabulary of a language. Now in China chances of language contact are greatly increased because of innovating and opening policy. Such phenomenon has been inevitably occurring throughout people's everyday life.If the right research has been done to the phenomenon, the internal organization of language and relations of language to society may, to a great extent, be revealed.Among various borrowings, lexical borrowing is the most universal, and in China it is the most outstanding, therefore, merits serious research.Researches ever done to lexical borrowings are mostly armchair studies, and those on language attitude, especially attitudes towards loan words are extremely rare. This paper will center on Chinese people's attitudes towards Chinese loan words from English. In this paper, 52 loan words in Chinese were included. They were collected from the latest newspapers, magazines and TV programs. They are classified into three categories in terms of the degree they are assimilated: completely assimilated words (CAW), partial assimilated words (PAW) and nearly assimilated words (NAW). An investigation was done by distributing a questionnaire (632 copies were given out through E-mail) to 1208 subjects in Baoding. 1090 of them, aging 11-75 answered it. They were divided into six groups in terms of educational level: primary school education(PE), Junior Middle school Education(JE), Senior Middle school Education(SE), College Education(CE), Master Education(ME) and Doctor Education(DE). The proportions of informants having good knowledge to each category of the loan words are observed, in terms of gender and educational level respectively; the proportions of the informants who prefer using representative(s) of each category of loan words are also observed in the same way. And the contrasts between the proportions show that people having good knowledge to CUWs are in the largest proportion, people having good knowledge to PAWs are in larger proportion, people having good knowledge to NAWs are in the least proportion; people who prefer using CUWs are in the largest proportion, people who prefer using PAWs are in larger proportion and people who are prefer using NAWs are in the least proportion. Social factors involved in affecting the result including: gender, age, educational level, region, occupation, annual income and so on. Among all these factors, neither is in isolation, they affect each other and interfere with each other.