Mongolian Students’ Language Use And Language Attitudes

One of the main uses of a language is to communicate. Language is the symbol of a nation and a society, and it is also used to set up and maintain social relationships. This is the reason why language is regarded as an important component of identity and culture for a nation. In the bilingual and multi-lingual society, influenced by the factors as the society, national feelings and aims, national motivation and behavior tendency, people may have certain recognition and make certain evaluation on the formation of the social value of a language. This kind of recognition and evaluation is usually called language attitudes.Language is the product of a certain society and language environment, thus with the changes of social development and language function, people’s attitudes towards language have the characteristics of variability. Language attitudes belong to the social psychological category, and it has great impact on people’s language view, language ability and language behavior. Therefore, it plays an important role in people’s language use. The study of language attitudes has theoretical value in the socio-linguistic field and an important practical value to understand the psychological characteristics of a nation, a group or a community, and to deal with the relationships between different nations and the problems existing in national language work.Based on the increasing tendency among members of minorities to educate their children not in Mongolian or send their children to the school where they are instructed in a language other than Mongolian. Therefore children do not speak or use Mongolian gradually and the children’s ability to Mongolian is becoming weaker and weaker. The thesis tries to apply the theory of language maintenance and language shift from socio-linguistic view with over400copies of questionnaires to discuss and analyze the language use and language attitudes of the Mongolian students in Shebertu town, Tongliao city. The results reveal that there exist big differences between the language use of the students educated in Mongolian and in Chinese because of many subjective and objective factors. But in general, students have the same attitudes towards Mongolian and Chinese. The students have strong feelings towards their minority language-Mongolian, and meanwhile they keep open and positive attitudes towards Chinese.