An Investigation Into Tibetan College Students’ Language Attitude And Their Language Use

Language attitude, language use and language maintenance have become hot issues in the field of applied linguistic research, and among which, there must be certain research on the ethnic minority languages. Yunnan is a multi-ethnic and multi-lingual province. It does have theoretical and practical significance to investigate the local ethnic minority groups’ language attitudes and language use. And ethnic minority college students are as a special group of ethnic minority groups, thus the thesis aims to investigate Tibetan college students’ language attitudes, language use and the major factors affecting them respectively. This study was undertaken to find out: 1) What are Tibetan college students’ attitudes toward Tibetan, Chinese and English? 2) What is the status quo of Tibetan college students’ language use? 3) What are the social factors affecting Tibetan college students’ language attitude and their language use? As the underlying aim of the study is to investigate Tibetan college students’ language attitude and their language use, both qualitative and quantitative methods are used in the study which involve a questionnaire and interviews, with 150 Tibetan college students from three universities in Kunming being the participants of the questionnaire and 2 of them being interviewees. Descriptive statistical analysis, Chi-square test and Person correlation are used to analyze the data from the questionnaires with the help of SPSS 11.5 software to address the research questions. The result shows that in general, most of the participants highly value their ethnic language from the affective perspective, and hold more positive attitudes toward Chinese and English from the cognitive perspective. Meanwhile, as one of ethnic minority languages, Tibetan has been well maintained. Even though participants’ proficiency in Chinese is a little higher, most of them are able to use Tibetan well. On the contrary, as college students, their proficiency in English is far from satisfying. Furthermore, the participants’ demographic condition and their parents’ marriage types(being inter-ethnic or intra-ethnic) mainly affect their language attitude and their language use.