| In order to eliminate language barrier and promote the development of economic, political and cultural construction, the Chinese government has issued a series of policies to promote mandarin since 1956. The measure has a great significance in safeguarding national unity and strengthening the cohesion of Chinese nation.At the same time of promoting mandarin, the use of dialect will be inevitably under the influence of national policy. Some linguists have noticed that there is threat to dialect in the process of mandarin promotion, and investigated the present situation of some dialects. Dialects paid more attention to mainly include:Shanghai dialect, Suzhou dialect, Guangzhou dialect, Guangxi dialect, and so on. While, there is few investigations into the current situation of Sichuan dialect.In this paper, in the form of questionnaire survey, the author investigated seven hundred college students from five universities in Sichuan province. Regard the subjects as a radiant point, the author collected present language use of three generations (the subjects’ generation, their parents’ generation, and their grandparents’ generation), to infer the present situation of language use in the whole Sichuan province.This thesis intends to solve four research questions:(1) What is the subjects’use frequency of mandarin and Sichuan dialect on different occasions? (2) What are Sichuan college students’ attitudes toward mandarin and Sichuan dialect? (3) Does code-switching between mandarin and Sichuan dialect happen in Sichuan people’s daily communication? Why? (4) Will different personal demographic backgrounds of Sichuan college students and their parents affect their language use, language attitude and code-switching?SPSS and EXCEL are used to analyze the data, which reflects the Sichuan local college students’ real use of Sichuan dialect and mandarin. And Halliday’s register theory, Jef Verschueren’s Linguistic Adaptation Theory and Yu Guodong’s Linguistic Adaptation Model are used to explain the deep-seated reasons of subjects’ present language use.The results of the research:(1) In inside family communication, use of Sichuan dialect and mandarin presents intergenerational diversity. In outside family communication, on official communication occasions, subjects use more mandarin than Sichuan dialect. On the contrary, on unofficial occasions, subjects tend to use more Sichuan dialect than mandarin. Subjects’language use presents adaptation to communication partners and language situations. Moreover, mandarin has not replaced Sichuan dialects to become high variety in Sichuan province. (2) Although subjects generally have positive feelings to Sichuan dialect and mandarin, and they want to study the two language varieties, they think Sichuan dialect is more important than mandarin in future daily communication of Sichuan province. (3) Code-switching often happens in subjects’ daily communication. When subjects encounter conversational partners’ code-switching, most of them will change their language according to the conversational partner, which reflects their adaptation to their conversational partner. According to Yu Guodong’s linguistic adaptation model, code-switching happens mainly for adaptation to linguistic reality and social conventions. (4) Subjects’gender does not play obvious influence on subjects’willingness to study Sichuan dialect or subjects’ attitudes to code-switching phenomena; however, it plays an obvious influence on subjects’ willingness to study mandarin. Different residences (village/town) do not play obvious influence on subjects’feelings to Sichuan dialect or subjects’ frequency of encountering code-switching phenomena. However, residence plays an obvious influence on subjects’ feelings to mandarin. Parents’different professions have no obvious influence on language use between parents and their children.Then, according to the results, the author puts forward practical and feasible suggestions to Sichuan local schools’ teaching language and government’s language policy. |
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