An Empirical Study On The Influence Of Language Distance On The Effect Of China's International Communication

This study aims to figure out how the language difference affects Chinese international communication,not only the path but also the effect.In order to answer this question,this study firstly quantifies the degree of difference between languages,measures the language distance between Chinese and other languages,then evaluates the effect of Chinese international communication,and analyzes the relationship between those two empirically in the end.The editing distance based on language interaction,the perception distance based on language learning and the characteristic distance based on linguistic features is the three most used measurement of language distance.This study chooses the characteristic distance measurement,firstly establishes the WALS index method based on the linguistic features index and evaluation in WALS corpus,secondly gains the language distance index between Chinese and the other 51 countries,thirdly ranks the country sample.This study uses Analytical Hierarchy Process and Delphi method to construct the effect evaluation system of Chinese international communication.The system mainly contains information flow index,cultural exchange index,social interaction index and national image recognition index,each index has different weight.After integrating the data of these indexes,each sample country gets its own ranking of international communication effect.This study depends on gravity model to analyze the influence of language distance on various aspects of Chinese international communication effect,the independent variables contain language distance and various explanatory variables,the dependent variables contain several indexes which used to measure Chinese international communication effect.The result shows that the language distance affects the informational flow index,the cultural exchange index and the social interaction index negatively,but has no relationship with national image recognition index.Based on the above conclusion,this study proposes several international communication strategies to achieve a better communication effect:classifying the communicated countries with language distance,enriching the international communication strategy with language planning,enriching the international communication flow with language content,improving the soft power of international communication with language culture,and strengthening the effect of international communication with language resources reserve.