| Almost every human language in the world is not static, since they are always in the state of change. Language variation is in the core position of sociolinguistic study, and one of the basic properties of language is variability. Language contact, as an external trigger mechanism of language change, accelerates the speed of language variation enormously; this kind of variation is mainly reflected in each level of language, such as in phonetics, lexicon and syntax.Since reform and opening up, the process of China's urbanization has quickened a lot; one of the important features of it is the mobility and migration of a large number of populations. The rapid development of urbanization has accelerated the mobility and the contact among peoples, and has caused the disintegration of traditional agricultural community, and more and more rural populations are faced with urbanization. In this process of urbanization, a large number of rural populations leave countryside for cities in order to search for new livelihoods; having been driven by economic interest, social motivation and awareness of status, and hoping to improve their self-images and then merge into cities quickly, migrant people begin to show a respect for Putonghua and give up their native dialects consciously, which has brought great changes to rural dialects, with lexical variation more patent.Using the research methods of sociolinguistics and being guided by language variation theory of sociolinguistics, this research adopts the methods of tape-recording and observing the daily speeches and conversations from 130 informants who are natives of Liuying village, Shangshui County, and a large amount of lexical variation samples have been collected, and then a questionnaire survey is used collectively to investigate lexical variation of rural dialect in the process of urbanization. In the end, under the help of several softwares like GOLDVARB X5, Excel (2007) and SPSS (13.0), the author gives an analysis of the data searched in large quantity with the method of statistics.As is found in this research, rural dialects are enduring great changes in the process of urbanization. The appearance of lexical variation of rural dialect is the result of effect brought by Putonghua in the process of urbanization, and when migrant people use local dialect to communicate with each other, they carry the lexical features of Putonghua into their dialect; in all five types of lexical variation, variation of adverbs of degree is most frequently seen, while variation of address form of daily necessities and kinship is a little less compared to the former kind, and variation of time adverbs and daily language is rarely seen; lexical variation is constrained by various social factors, females use variation forms more than males; those who receive education of university or higher education use variation forms more frequently, and because of the worship to Putonghua, those who have education of junior middle school prefer to use variation forms than the ones who have education of senior high school; those who are students and migrant workers more easily accept the variation forms; generally speaking, people have a positive attitude towards this phenomenon of language variation. In the predication of values of the local dialect and Putonghua, the maintenance of the local dialect is decreasing gradually, while Putonghua has high status and practical value.Every dialect is the carrier of a special kind of culture, to a great extent, abandoning a kind of dialect is abandoning a unique and excellent culture. Analyzing rural dialect variation in the background of urbanization process is not onlyhelping to reveal the trajectory of changes of rural dialect, but also helping to record the disappearing precious linguistic data because of promotion of urbanization, which could also urge the government to establish right and proper language policies.Subjecting to constraints of the present research, the findings of this paper need to be proved by further researches. |
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