Loss And Maintenance Of The Daur Language From The Perspective Of Sociolinguistics

China is a multi-ethnic and multi-lingual country whose language environment is extraordinarily complicated, with more than 120 ethnic languages being used. However, as the society and economy develop, most of the ethnic languages have been showing some signs of language shift and language loss to a greater or lesser degree and some "small" ethnic languages are even in danger of extinction in recent years.Chinese linguists tend to assess the "endangered" languages on the basis of the restricted criteria, such as the native speakers' age, intergenerational language transmission, population etc.. If they took the relationship between the ethnic languages and lingua franca—Mandarin Chinese, usage of the ethnic languages in social domains and the degree of ethnic literature and education's development into account, a large number of the ethnic languages would have already become extinct or be on the verge of extinction. Under this circumstance, it is far-reaching significant that the writer has chosen the Daur language—a representative language of northern ethnic groups—as the object of study to conduct research on the level of its language loss, the internal and external reasons for its loss and the proposals to protect it.Maintaining a language is maintaining culture. To a certain nationality, the extinction of its ethnic language must be a loss; to human beings, it must be a catastrophe for the cultural and linguistic diversity. The research on the Daur language loss and maintenance will provide the linguists home and abroad with valuable linguistic materials and data, enrich national research on the ethnic languages, promote people's understanding of the Daur language and its culture, and assist the government to formulate the proper language policy to protect the other "small" ethnic languages.It is virtually impossible to merely depend on the individuals' efforts to halt the loss or even extinction of the Daur language, but the individuals' appeals can arouse some international organizations, governments, and ordinary persons' enthusiasm for and attention to this issue, so that they will take action to maintain the endangered ethnic languages.