Uyghur-Chinese Code-switching And Its Social Factors

In this study, the author applied both qualitative and quantitive methods inaccordance with domain analysis of Joshua Fishman to investigate the influence ofsocial factors on Uyghur people’s code-switching and language choice in differentdomains.There are89subjects in the natural recording,353subjects in the questionnaireand40subjects in the interview. Frequency of Chinese embedded constituents isanalyzed from the recording data. The Excel and SPSS were used for the analysis ofthe valid353pieces of questionnaires. Research subjects were categorized into fourgroups: education level group, age group, gender group and occupation group, andfive domains: family domain, friend domain, school/work domain, education domainand Internet domain. The main findings are listed below:1. According to Polack’s division on code-switching, there are three types ofUyghur-Chinese code-switching: intra-sentential code-switching, extra-sententialcode-switching and tag switching, and the most frequently used Uyghur-Chinesecode-switching is intra-sentential code-switching, while tag switching is the least usedone.2. The grammatical features of code-switching: words and phrases are the mostfrequently switched elements, and single words are most frequently used as these twolanguages have corresponding word classes, and the number of pure Chinesesentences is also noteworthy, most of the subjects who code-switch at sentence levelhave high education level and high Chinese proficiency. The social features ofcode-switching: the frequency of female code-switching is higher than male, thesubjects from21-30years old group code-switch the most, the education level isproportional to code-switching frequency, the higher the education level is, the higherthe code-switching frequency is, and students is the highly code-switching subjects.3. The influence of the social factors towards subjects’ language choice in eachdomain in descending order are the subjects’ age, educational level and occupation,and the influence of gender is not obvious. The subjects’ overall attitude towards code-switching is negative, however, the influence of gender on language attitude isnotable, men have stronger opinion about code-switching and language maintainancethan women.4. Most of the subjects do not like Uyghur-Chinese code-switching, as this willinfluence the purity of Uyghur language and language maintenance. Most of theparticipants support bilingual education, but they don’t approve its education pattern,which gives priority to Chinese language education while less attention is paid toUyghur language education. They prefer Uyghur language education duringelementary education, and in their opinion, bilingual education should be carried outgradually from middle school with the balanced usage of Uyghur and Chinese. Withthe effort of schools, parents and students, bilingual education can be improved andperfected day by day.