A Comparative Study Of The Family Language Planning Of City Families In Beijing And Kaifeng

With the deepening of urbanization in China,the proportion of urban immigrant population is increasing,and the demographic composition of city families tends to be diversified.Therefore,family language planning(FLP)becomes more complex.The current research is limited to one city and there is no cross-regional comparison.Moreover,it usually focuses on describing the current situation of FLP and seldom systematically analyzes the influencing factors.Under the framework of Language Management theory(Spolsky 2009,2019)and the interdisciplinary dynamic framework of FLP(Curdt-Christiansen 2018;Curdt-Christiansen and Huang 2020),this paper compares the FLP in the two regions through questionnaire and case study,taking the primary school students’ families in Beijing Haidian district and Kaifeng city(urban district)as the main research objects.It further explains the influencing factors of the FLP from multiple dimensions.There are three main findings.Firstly,the FLP in the two regions shows three commonalities:(1)The dialect ability of the next generation has a tendency to weaken.(2)Both parents and children have high evaluation of Putonghua whlie grandparents have high evaluation of dialects.(3)Parents lack the awareness of FLP.Secondly,there are two main differences:(1)Beijing’s parents and children have higher evaluation of Putonghua and English.(2)Beijing’s parents and grandparents have relatively more control over their children’s use of Putonghua.Thirdly,the wide spread of English,the national official language policy,the speech community outside the family,the personal experience of parents,the self-management of children and the influence of other family members all have an impact on the FLP.The results show that FLP is formed under the joint action of macro-level,meso-level and micro-level factors.The internal and external factors coexist and influence the language practice,language beliefs and language management in the family domain explicitly or implicitly.