Research On Native Youngsters' Attitudes Towards Huizhou Dialect

Huizhou city presents a very complicated language situation for its special cultural and historical environment. It is very common that many dialects coexist in the city. Huizhou dialect prevails in the Huicheng District and some parts of Boluo, Huidong, Longmen County and Huiyang District. Huizhou dialect is the mother tongue of people who live in these areas from generation to generation. In the last few decades, the population of people using Huizhou dialect has not declined, but the proportion of people using it is on the downside. This change relates to the fact that Huizhou has gradually become a complicated immigrant city with Putonghua being popularized as the common language, and it is also because of the influence and assimilation of peripheral dialects.Language attitude is the reflection of social psychology of people. It reveals people's feeling and evaluation of the speakers of the language or variety, and it also shows the social status of the variety and the stereotypes towards the speakers of these varieties. Based on the theories and research approaches of sociolingustics, this study investigates the native youngsters'attitudes towards Huizhou dialect through a social psychological experiment and a sociolinguistic survey as a supplement. The native youngsters investigated here range from 16 to 25 whose mother tongue is Huizhou dialect, or at least who speak to the members of their families in Huizhou dialect. This research involves 68 students attending Huizhou No.4 Middle School and Huizhou College. It adopts the matched-guise technique with three varieties of Putonghua, Cantonese and Huizhou dialect to get evaluations of social status and solidarity dimensions, and then applies the questionnaire as a supplement to reveal varieties in different contexts. And finally we analyze the data obtained quantitatively with SPSS (13.0) and Excel (2000) software.Through this research, we can see that Putonghua is a supreme language with the history and national power, but Cantonese is a local high language in the social status dimension and it has the highest level of prestige. In the solidarity dimension, the subjects still prefer Huizhou dialect. The results of the comparison and analysis of male and female subjects'evaluation on the varieties reveal that there exist some differences of language attitudes between male and female subjects. In the dimension of solidarity, more male subjects consider that the Huizhou dialect speakers are straightforward. Female subjects evaluate almost all items higher in Putonghua and Cantonese than male subjects do. But on the whole, the differences are not very significant, mainly because of the more gender equality nowadays than that in the past in China. The results of the comparison of educational levels and places of childhood spent reveal that educational level and place of childhood spent differentiations are not dramatically marked from the experiment, mainly due to the complicated language environment of Huizhou. Most Huizhouneses can meet different dialects even when they were children.Putonghua is the national language and can guarantee the quality and efficiency of communication. It should continue to be popularized. But Huizhou dialect reflects Huizhou traditional culture, it should be preserved as the precious Chinese traditional heritage. Every dialect is a unique part of our country's language. Thus research on people's attitudes towards dialects is beneficial to the maintenance of Chinese culture.