A Sociolinguistic Study On Jinan Street Name

Jinan is the capital of Shandong Province, with a history of over 2600 years. As thepolitical centre of Shandong Province, it has witnessed several political evolutions. Moreover,as the provincial cultural centre, it reflects intensively the Qilu culture, especially theConfucius culture. Influenced by it, People in Jinan are inclined to be virtuous and honestman, thinking highly of education.Jinan has picturesque scenery, surrounded with springs, lakes and mountains. BaotuSpring, Daming Lake, and Qianfo Mountain are top three places of interest in Jinan. Jinan isalso named“Spring City”, where more than 700 springs are located. Among these springs,Baotu Spring is famous as“the finest spring under heaven”. There are a mass of mountains inJinan, like Qinglong Mountain, Wufeng Mountain, Que Mountain and so on.As such an attractive city, Jinan needs us to get a close understanding of its evolutions,and its culture and history. Street name is applied as a tool, which is the“business card of acity”. Through the research on street name, the relationship between language, culture andsociety can be explored. This is also the research objective of this thesis. Based on it, fourspecific questions are to be addressed in this study:1. What is the situation of Jinan street naming?2. What are the sociolinguistic features of Jinan street names?3. What is the situation of evolution of Jinan street naming?4. What are the reasons behind the identified sociolinguistic features in Jinan streetnames?Language has a close relationship with culture and society, which is an important branchof sociolinguistics. The focus of sociolinguistics is to study the relationship between languagevariation and social context; moreover, the former is influenced by society, local culture,economic and political issues. However, researches on this issue by sociolinguistics are notenough in Jinan. Among all the collected materials, almost all of the big and medium sizedcities’place names in China have been analyzed from linguistics’view, including sociolinguistic’s view, while Jinan, as a provincial capital, is seldom chosen as the object ofstudy. To fill in this gap, this thesis is designed to analyze Jinan’s street names insociolinguistic studies, with a wish of standardizing its street naming.Based on Xu Daming’s method of data collection, document analysis is applied in thisthesis. By qualitative and quantitative research, several periods of street naming are divided.Through diachronic linguistic study, it is found that big political and economic events canarouse related changes of street naming in Jinan, and these street names reflect ideas of socialand political trend. Besides, through categorizing street names of Jinan by synchronic study,they reflect local culture, history, education, geographical features and so on.Afterwards, the author gives out suggestions for street naming in Jinan, from bothscientific and practical viewpoint. Moreover, during the urban construction in Jinan, some oldbuildings and streets are replaced by new buildings and streets. How to keep the balancebetween tradition and modernization is discussed in the end.