A Survey Of Language Choice And Identity Of New Immigrants In Kunming

This paper is a sociolinguistic research on current language contact in Kunming,which is aiming at the description of language choice and identity when new immigrants live,work and study in Kunming with the process of urbanization to reflect the reality of language contact and language change from the perspective of new immigrants.With the continuous entry of new immigrants,language contact has become more and more close.According to the history,Kunming is an immigration city.Nowadays,there are a large number of Kunming’s population from other cities in the same province and some of them are from other provinces.On the basis of research in the field of sociolinguistics,the immigrants in Kunming after 1980 s are defined as new immigrants by this paper.The new immigrants are divided into new immigrants in the province and new immigrants outside the province,due to the language environment of the new immigrants in the province is similar to that of the local people in Kunming,in order to explore and analyze,the new immigrants in the province are divided into the new generation under 30 years old and the old generation over 30 years old.In order to research the language choice and identity of new immigrants,first of all,the language environment of Kunming and the language background of the new immigrants are comprehended,and then,the language choice and identity of new immigrants in and out of the province are investigated.Through the analysis of new immigrants’ dialect background,gender,age,education background,social class and other characteristics and the relationship between language choice and identity,the use of Kunming dialect,Putonghua and other dialects and their influence on the language choice and identification of new immigrants are observed.The language choice of new immigrants in Kunming is investigated by using the methods of questionnaire,interview,asking the way and observation.The thesis consists of six chapters.The first chapter is the introduction,which introduces the research purpose,significance,research methods,research status and related concepts.The second chapter defines the new immigrants and explains the basic structure of the new immigrants in Kunming.The third chapter makes a preliminary investigation on the current situation of language communication in Kunming and finds that the language environment in Kunming is a multilingual environment in which mandarin and Kunming dialect are used together.The fourth chapter presents the results of the survey on the language choice of new immigrants in Kunming,and calculates the correlation between the language choice of new immigrants from outside the province and social factors through SPSS.The results show that the language choice of new immigrants is correlated with their educational background.The fifth chapter is the identification survey of the new immigrants.It mainly investigates the language attitudes of the new immigrants from outside the province and the acquisition of Kunming dialect.It also uses SPSS to calculate.The sixth chapter summarizes the whole paper.In the language environment of Kunming dialect and mandarin,the language choice of new immigrants presents diversity.Compared with the new immigrants from other provinces,the new immigrants from other provinces showed more obvious behavior of language adaptation.Moreover,the language choice of immigrants from other provinces is correlated with their educational background.The survey on the identity of new immigrants shows that there is little correlation between language attitude and social factors,but there is a correlation between language acquisition and the occupation of new immigrants from outside the province.