Immigration and Language Change:A Study of a New Variety of Putonghua by Two Generations of a Chinese Community in York of UK
Contact-induced language change has been the focus of Variationist Sociolinguistics.Along with migration,contact among people from various countries is becoming more frequent.When speakers of two or more languages interact and impact each other,various linguistic consequences may occur.This study focuses on the maintenance and change of the use of Putonghua overseas by two generations of immigrants from China.The linguistic consequences include a shift from regional varieties to Putonghua and lexical bor-rowing among the first-generation adults and a shifting tendency of older children to English-dominant bilin-guals among the second-generation children.The maintenance of Chinese is optimistic,but Putonghua used by overseas Chinese immigrants is undergoing some lexical,phonetic,or syntactic changes.A new variety of Putonghua has been forming among the overseas Chinese Community,with older children as the main inno-vators of the new linguistic forms.The new variety of Putonghua reflects the inheritance,change and devel-opment of the Chinese language.
variationist sociolinguisticsurban contact language and changeimmigrationPutonghuaa new variety of language
万方数据
维普
