A Survey Of The Language Use Of Dongxiang People In Gansu Province

This paper mainly studies the Dongxiang nationality language using from the perspective of social linguistics,in order to explore various social factors of languages and their users.Meanwhile,the study also attempt to get a further understanding of the development of local economy,education,social consciousness and the attitude of social identity through the speech community of Dongxiang Autonomous County of Linxia in GanSu province.In the end,we can reach a conclusion to provide a reference about the formulation of language policy and language planning for the relevant government departments.Using the classifying sample survey among the language users,we do the survey mainly from two aspects including the personal language using and the interpersonal language using.The former refers to the language used by same speakers(or the same nationalities)in different communicative situations or different communicative objects.The latter refers to the language used by speakers(or nationalities)among the diverse social characteristics and conditions(such as gender,age,class,occupation,education level).The content of this paper consists of five chapters.The first chapter is the introduction part which introduces the research origin,research status,research significance,the theoretical basis of research and summary.The second to fourth chapters,using the combination of questionnaire and interview method,making a detailed description in language using,language ability,and language attitude of Dongxiang autonomous area in GanSu.Furthermore,we analyze the related survey data and statistics through SPSS(Statistic package for social science),using correlation analysis,variance analysis,linear regression analysis and NOVA(Analysis of Variance)to study the influence factors of the Dongxiang nationality language use.The fifth chapter summarizes the full text,thinking about the limitations of this research,and putting forward the protection-measures of Dongxiang language.The viewpoints of this paper is as follows:Firstly,from the users' aspect,there are three significant types of Gansu Dongxiang nationality language using.The first one is the native language endangered.This type is reflected most obviously in language using among Dongxiang minority students.The second one is only native language.This type is especially obvious in language using of the elderly population.The third one is mixed language which is divided into the compound of Dongxiang language and local dialect,and various mixed language.Part of the surveyed population who are between the age of 20 and 45 use both Dongxiang language and the local dialect.They choose the language according to different communicative occasions or different languages occupation.For teachers,cadres,businessmen,medical personnel,public officials and state-owned enterprises,a part of student,they live in diverse social situations,facing widely communication occasions,they need to work or study,so they have to learn Mandarin or local dialect.Secondly,the current situation of the language use in Gansu Dongxiang area is the inevitable result of the interaction of many factors,including internal and external reasons.The internal reason depends on the Dongxiang nationality language user's attitude,language ability,national customs.The external reasons include the geographical environment,historical conditions,social economy,education level in this area.Lastly,the paper puts forward the idea of protecting the Dongxiang language from the perspective of social linguistics.From the result of the survey of Dongxiang autonomous region in Gansu,the special language using situation due to the geographical environment,economy,politics and other factors.Dongxiang language will gradually become an extinct language.The ideas of protecting Dongxiang language which this paper puts forward are as follows:on the one hand,make the Dongxiang language value more clear.What's more,make a good use of national language policy.On the other hand,broaden the use of channels of DongXiang language.Meanwhile,the most important measure is creating characters for Dongxiang language and building the corpus of DongXiang language.