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Abstract Throughout the history, human languages and societies have co-evolved. However, in a period of rapid social development, the evolution of languages may lag, leading to a series of linguistic and social problems. In modernization, with the large-scale population movements, language contact has become frequent. To ensure communication, people speaking different mother tongues (or dialects) need a common language that is widely spoken. Dialects competed with common languages in various channels, resulting in a “super-diversity” picture of language. The existing dialect speech communities in cities started to shrink, and the diglossia between dialects and common languages has gradually been unbalanced, resulting in monolingualism and a crisis in language ecology, cultural inheritance, national security, and so on. This is a common language problem faced by all countries in modernization, and Chinese society is no exception. However, Chinese modernization is a parallel pattern in which industrialization, urbanization, information technology, and agricultural modernization coordinate, thus providing new conditions for solving sociolinguistic problems. Significantly, the Internet virtual space constructed by information technology has become essential in people’s language lives, affecting the relationship between dialects and the common language.
The sociolinguistic investigation is a prerequisite for capturing and solving language problems and carrying out language planning activities. Based on Gardner’s “instrumental-integrated orientation” model of attitudes, this paper investigates the attitudes of residents in the Chinese mainland towards dialects, Putonghua and English, as well as their attitudes towards using and preserving dialects in virtual space. The results show that people share the same tendency towards the instrumental value of Putonghua (social, economic, and other benefits) and the intrinsic value of dialect (culture, identity, and other aspects). The floating population’s (both integrated and instrumental) attitude towards dialect is less positive than that of the non-floating population, but their instrumental attitude towards Putonghua is more assertive. Respondents with a southern dialect background generally prefer dialects more than those in the north. From the perspective of language attitude, the relationship between Putonghua and dialects in “super-diversity” is still high and low variety, but the stability of this relationship is increasingly damaged. Based on the survey data and the latest theory of speech community, this paper addresses the four advantages of virtual speech community as a dialect habitat, including strong subject initiative, high network density, interaction with real speech community, and convergence of human resources. It is thus proposed that traditional real speech community and virtual speech community function with different emphases, the former based on the instrumental value of language, the latter the integrated, and that virtual speech community is a complementary form of traditional speech community in linguistic “super-diversity”.
The innovations of this paper are found in three aspects. First, while investigating the language problems that all countries in the world should face in the modernization process, the paper deeply incorporates the characteristics of Chinese modernization and initiates the Chinese strategy of facilitating the relationship between dialects and the common language. Secondly, compared with the existing language attitude research, the investigation of the paper, with a questionnaire based on the widely recognized attitude model in the academic circle, has a broader coverage of respondents and has therefore obtained findings with more realistic significance. Third, based on the survey data and existing theories, the advantages and characteristics of virtual speech communities in regulating the relationship between dialects and common language have been put forward, and the relationship between virtual speech communities and traditional speech communities is clarified, which is expected to enrich the theory of speech communities. Suggestions for managing language ecology Chinese modernization have been proposed: implementing language planning scientifically through sociolinguistic investigation, and the interaction effect between real and virtual speech space should be brought into play following the development pattern of Chinese modernization.
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Published: 26 July 2024
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