A Survey On The Usage Of Putonghua In Catering Industry In Xiangtan Urban Districts

The form of language is complex and diverse and language reflects all aspects ofpeople’s life. With the contact between different languages, the usage of language will alsochange. Along with the change of times and the development of economy, people contact witheach other more frequently. The phenomenon of coexistence of various languages iscommonly seen all over the world. More and more sociolinguists focus on the issue ofbilingualism or multilingualismThe study, based on bilingualism study of sociolinguistics, investigates the language useand employees’ attitudes towards Putonghua in catering industry in Xiangtan urban districts.The author investigates30different levels of restaurants in Xiangtan urban districts. Thesubjects of this study are98employees from these30restaurants. The author tape-records theinformants’ naturalistic conversation and applies participant and non-participant observationto collect real and natural linguistic data. All these data obtained are analyzed through thedistributional analysis and the multivariate analysis. The author also designs a questionnaireto investigate the98subjects’ language attitudes towards Putonghua. Finally, the authormakes quantitative analyses to analyze the collected data with the mathematical statisticsmethods by Goldvarb X program, Excel2007and SPSS (13.0).Through the investigation, it is found that Putonghua and Xiangtan dialect are two majorlanguage varieties used by employees in catering industry in Xiangtan urban districts.Although over half of employees often use Putonghua in catering industry, Xiangtan dialect isalso active in this industry. Under the influence of social and economic status, there is aremarkable difference of employees’ usage of Putonghua in different levels of restaurants.Employees in high level of restaurants use Putonghua more frequently than employees inmiddle and low level of restaurants. Meanwhile, the results have proved that educationalbackground and the close relationship are two significant social factors having great impacton the usage of Putonghua in catering industry, followed by factor age. To be more specific,the higher the levels of education employees have, the more frequently Putonghua they use;and the employees present different patterns of internal language and external language; whilethe use of Putonghua decreases with the increasing of the age. In terms of language attitude, subjects have open and positive attitudes towards Putonghua. Putonghua is considered as alanguage with social influence and usefulness. People speaking Putonghua can receive highersocial recognition. Subjects commonly think speaking Putonghua in the work is verynecessary.Xiangtan dialect is precious wealth for Xiangtan city and is the carrier of Xiangtanculture, which should be maintained. However, under the promotion of urbanization, there aremore and more people flowing in Xiangtan city and bilingualism prevails largely.Strengthening the promotion and popularization of Putonghua and standardizing languages ofcatering industry have promoting effect on the development of catering industry, the progressof society and building good image of the whole city.