Family Language Policy In Hani Families

In the past decade,family language policy as it relates to language maintenance or loss study in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics studies has been received increasing attention.A pioneering series of studies on family language policy has been done from interdisciplinary perspectives in the world.However,research on family language policy at home has been scant,not to mention empirical studies.Thus,it is extremely important to do research on family language policy,in particular into the multilingual ethnic minority regions in southwest China Yunnan province,where minority language maintenance is confronting growing challenges.The present study was based on a Hani community——Wulong Community of Yinyuan Village in Yinyuan town,Yuanjiang County,Yuxi City,Yunan province.It aimed to explore family language policy by the parents and the children of an ethnic group and relationships among the parents‘ language ideology,the children‘s language ideology,the parents‘ language management,the parents‘ language practice and the children‘s language practice.Based on the Spolsky‘ three-dimensional approach to family language policy,the research employed two especially adapted questionnaires.Interviews were conducted with the 16 families for both the parents and the children.The results were obtained with the help of SPSS 19.0.The findings of the study showed that: firstly,the Hani language was the main language used with family members by the parents and the children.When Hani visitors came,the Hani language was always the main language they communicate with.While Hani parents communicated with visitors from other minority groups,the choice of the language(s)depended on the language(s)the visitors used.For the children,Putonghua was the first-choice language when communicating with teachers,while the Hani language and Putonghua were the most frequently used languages with Hani classmates,and local dialect and Putonghua were the frequent choice with classmates from other minority groups.After school,all the three languages were their communicative language.Putonghua was the main choice in leisure-time programs,while Hani songs were in danger of dying out as few know them now.Secondly,almost all the parents and the children had no idea of language management in spite of knowing the importance of the role of family domain in their children‘s language learning.Thirdly,the parents held the view that their children could easily learn the three languages in their daily life,and acknowledged that a language handicap showed no relationship with their children‘ language learning.Meanwhile,the parents had more positive attitudes towards the Hani language and Putonghua than local dialect.The children considered the Hani language as the most frequently used language among family members and viewed Putonghua as the most important language for their future.Fourthly,with the help of normalization method and principle component analysis of SPSS,the seven factors were extracted.They were the Hani language,local dialect,Putonghua,the Hani language and local dialect,the Hani language and Putonghua,local dialect and Putonghua,the Hani language,local dialect and Putonghua.Research on the relationship among parents‘ language ideology,parents‘ language management,parents‘ language practice,children‘s language ideology and children‘s language practice revealed:(1)there was no significant association between the factor of parents‘ language attitudes and the corresponding factor of children‘s language attitude;(2)The relationship in following terms also showed no significance: the parents‘ language management and each factor of the parents‘ language ideology;the parents‘ language management and the parents‘ language practice;the parents‘ language management and each factor of the children‘s language ideology;the parents‘ language management and the children‘s language practice;(3)An insignificant correlation was also apparent in regard to each factor of the parents‘ language ideology and the parents‘ language practice as well as to each factor of the parents‘ language ideology and the children‘ language practice(except for the parents‘ language ideology towards local dialect and the children‘s language practice towards fathers);(4)No significant relationship between each factor of the children‘s language ideology and the children‘s language practice towards fathers and mothers(except with reference to the children‘s language ideology towards the Hani language and the children‘s language practice towards fathers)was discovered;(5)There remained correlation between the parents‘ language practice and the children‘s language practice towards mothers but not with fathers.Some suggestions about family language policy were put forward that were based on research.Finally,the limitations of the present research and suggestions for future research were presented.