부산대학교 도서관

Language endangerment and language death are common phenomena in the world. The vitality of a language is determined by its adaptability and adjustment ability to the threats in its ecological environment. In order to shed some lights on the dialect endangerment and dialect protection in the urbanization process of contemporary society, this study takes the Wenling speech community of the Wu language as an example study and investigates its language ecology. By applying multiple linguistic methods, this study intends to answer the following three questions: 1. What is the internal language ecology of the speech community? 2. What is the external language ecology of the speech community? 3. How is the current language use and language attitude of the speech community classified in the scale of language vitality and what language planning methods are necessary to ensure healthy development of the ecology of language? The results of this study are as follows: Question 1: The study of internal language ecology is focused on language features and language change. The Wenling Wu language has preserved many language features of the old Chinese and its intelligibility score with Mandarin Chinese is far below 80%. It means these two languages are so different that they can hardly communicate with each other. Meanwhile, by the influence of Mandarin Chinese, some of the distinctive features of the Wenling Wu language are disappearing and it shows more similarities with Mandarin Chinese now. In this process, vocabulary changes fast, while phonology and syntax change slowly. Question 2: The external language ecology is focused on language proficiency, language choice and language attitude. All of the participants had good language proficiency and could use the Wu language to fulfill their basic needs in daily life. However, some of the young generation and adult generation had poor knowledge on cultural words. In terms of diglossia, the Wenling Wu language is widely used as the low variety in daily life while Mandarin Chinese serves as the high variety. The Wenling people have a rational attitude on their mother tongue. Comparing with Mandarin Chinese, Wenling Wu was evaluated high on psychological emotion and communicative function and low on its social status. Question 3: The vitality of the Wenling Wu language can be classified as “sustainable spoken”. However, with the competition of Mandarin Chinese, it still reveals some endangerment features from the cross-sectional perspective, such as the loss of distinctive language features, the decrease of social status and the weakening of the speakers’ emotional attachment to the language. In order to deal with its potential endangerment, this study proposes to apply language planning methods to ensure healthy development. Some of the effective language planning methods are provided.