Download or read book An Investigation Into Language Shift Amongst Rural and Urban Naxi Students written by Qing-hong Li and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Language is an important symbol of ethnicity. The study investigates the extent of minority language maintenance and language use by students of Naxi nationality, one of the ethnic groups in Yunnan province. The writer is herself a member of this ethnic group. Data was collected from 60 oral productions of Naxi and Putonghua, the official language of China, by rural and urban middle school students of Lijiang. As the extent to which students acquire the Naxi language and Chinese is different, methodologies were used differently. Naxi people only speak the language but cannot use the written form. Analysis focuses on the Naxi phonological encoding by using Levelt's Bilingual Production Model as well as on five features of Putonghua. Additional insights are sought through questionnaires and interviews. The results show that there are indeed significant differences between the Naxi and Putonghua production of urban and rural Naxi students. The study reveals that rural students preserve their minority language well, while their Putonghua has a Naxi local accent. Urban students who have a greater need and opportunity to communicate with local Han people and tourists from home and abroad, exhibit a much higher proficiency in Putonghua compared to rural students. This is in keeping with Schumann's Acculturation theory that the degree to which a learner acculturates to the target language group will control the degree to which he acquires the second language. The study also reveals a related tendency towards reduced use and even non-use of Naxi language amonst these urban students. Thus, the study suggests the need for a course about Naxi language and culture if Naxi identity is to be maintained. Although the study has certain limitations, it does suggest that a better understanding of phonological systems of the two languages will contribute a great deal to the preservation of the Naxi language and also to speaking the official language well for survival in the broader social and economic context.
Download or read book Language Maintenance and Shift Across Generations in Inner Mongolia written by Sarala Puthuval and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Language shift happens when a group of people stops using one language in favor of another, such that subsequent generations no longer acquire the original language. Research on the sociolinguistics of language shift has tended to focus on anguages in advanced states of endangerment, where most or all children in the community have already stopped acquiring the language. Less work has been done on the long-term processes that can turn a moderately threatened language into a critically endangered or moribund language. A better understanding of the long-term dynamics of language shift would improve not only our understanding of the current language endangerment crisis, but also our understanding of language ecology and language contact at earlier periods in human history. To this end, the present study takes Fishman's concept of language maintenance versus shift as different outcomes of intergenerational mother tongue transmission, and formalizes it for quantitative research. Mongolian in China can be considered a moderately-threatened language. Though it is the national language of Mongolia, more than half the world's Mongolian speakers live in China, and most major dialect branches are spoken only in China. Within China, Mongolian speakers are a small minority even in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (IMAR), where they are most concentrated. Contact between Mongolian and Chinese speakers has gone on in southern Inner Mongolia since at least the 1700s, but during the 20th century it intensified and expanded to the rest of IMAR, especially after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. Previous research has established that some portion of ethnic Mongol children in the IMAR are no longer acquiring Mongolian, while most adult speakers are bilingual with Chinese. Mongolian has overt prestige as a cultural symbol, but is seen as backward and less useful than Chinese. This thesis presents results from a field survey of over 600 ethnic Mongols born between 1920 and 2007 in the IMAR. It investigates two processes, the spread of Chinese among Mongolian speakers (i.e. the growth of bilingualism), and the maintenance versus loss of Mongolian among children in bilingual communities. It also demonstrates a new method for the quantitative study of language shift and intergenerational language transmission in language communities that are too large to be observable through ethnography alone. The unit of analysis is the intergenerational dyad rather than the individual speaker. Results are analyzed over time, based on speakers' age, and across space, based on speakers' location of residence and how urban that location was. The analysis shows that Chinese proficiency spread rapidly through the Mongolian-speaking population during the mid to late twentieth century, reaching a saturation point among Mongolian speakers born in the 1980s and later, nearly all of whom are proficient in Chinese. Surprisingly, given claims in previous literature, the loss of Mongolian has been much more gradual, and there is no identifiable "shifting generation" or "transitional generation" in this sample. Instead, the rate of shift among children raised by Mongolian-Chinese bilingual parents remains the same for all age cohorts born in the latter half of the twentieth century. Urban versus rural residence, however, plays an important role. The proportion of shifting individuals is much higher among children raised in large cities than among those raised in medium-size towns or rural areas, regardless of birth year. As China's population becomes more urbanized, shift from Mongolian to Chinese may accelerate in the near future. Even if the rate of shift stays the same, a steady proportional decline in each generation will still have a cumulative effect, resulting in an exponential decline in the population of Mongolian speakers. This observation helps to explain how language shift can proceed in a gradual manner for many decades and even centuries, then (apparently suddenly) overtake the remaining speakers in a single generation.
Download or read book Sociological Abstracts written by and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: CSA Sociological Abstracts abstracts and indexes the international literature in sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences. The database provides abstracts of journal articles and citations to book reviews drawn from over 1,800+ serials publications, and also provides abstracts of books, book chapters, dissertations, and conference papers.
Download or read book Cultural Heritage Politics in China written by Tami Blumenfield and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-05-14 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores China’s cultural heritage ideology and policies from three interrelated perspectives: the State and World Heritage tourism; cultural heritage tourism at undesignated sites, and the cultural politics of museums and collections. Something of a cultural heritage designation craze is happening in China. This is new within even the last five to ten years. Officials at many levels now see heritage preservation as a means for commoditizing their regions. They are devoting new resources and attention to national and international heritage designations. Thus, addressing cultural heritage politics in a nation dedicated to designation is an important project, particularly in the context of a rapidly growing economy. This volume is also important because it addresses a very wide range of cultural heritage, providing an excellent sample of case studies: historic vernacular urban environments, ethnic tourism, scenic tourism, pilgrimage as tourism, tourism and economic development, museums, border heritage, underwater remains, and the actual governance and management of the sites. This volume is an outstanding introduction to cultural heritage issues in China while contributing to Chinese studies for those with greater knowledge of the area.
Download or read book Dissertation Abstracts International written by and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town written by Rogers Brubaker and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Situated on the geographic margins of two nations, yet imagined as central to each, Transylvania has long been a site of nationalist struggles. Since the fall of communism, these struggles have been particularly intense in Cluj, Transylvania's cultural and political center. Yet heated nationalist rhetoric has evoked only muted popular response. The citizens of Cluj--the Romanian-speaking majority and the Hungarian-speaking minority--have been largely indifferent to the nationalist claims made in their names. Based on seven years of field research, this book examines not only the sharply polarized fields of nationalist politics--in Cluj, Transylvania, and the wider region--but also the more fluid terrain on which ethnicity and nationhood are experienced, enacted, and understood in everyday life. In doing so the book addresses fundamental questions about ethnicity: where it is, when it matters, and how it works. Bridging conventional divisions of academic labor, Rogers Brubaker and his collaborators employ perspectives seldom found together: historical and ethnographic, institutional and interactional, political and experiential. Further developing the argument of Brubaker's groundbreaking Ethnicity without Groups, the book demonstrates that it is ultimately in and through everyday experience--as much as in political contestation or cultural articulation--that ethnicity and nationhood are produced and reproduced as basic categories of social and political life.
Download or read book First Language Attrition Use and Maintenance written by Monika S. Schmid and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2002 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Accompanying CD, also called a CD-ROM by publisher, contains ... "excerpts from more than twenty of the interviews analyzed." -- p. [4] of cover.
Download or read book AF Press Clips written by and published by . This book was released on 1982 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Contemporary China written by Tamara Jacka and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-30 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China's rapid economic growth, modernization and globalization have led to astounding social changes. Contemporary China provides a fascinating portrayal of society and social change in the contemporary People's Republic of China. This book introduces readers to key sociological perspectives, themes and debates about Chinese society. It explores topics such as family life, citizenship, gender, ethnicity, labour, religion, education, class and rural/urban inequalities. It considers China's imperial past, the social and institutional legacies of the Maoist era, and the momentous forces shaping it in the present. It also emphasises diversity and multiplicity, encouraging readers to consider new perspectives and rethink Western stereotypes about China and its people. Real-life case studies illustrate the key features of social relations and change in China. Definitions of key terms, discussion questions and lists of further reading help consolidate learning. Including full-colour maps and photographs, this book offers remarkable insight into Chinese society and social change.
Download or read book Open Your Eyes written by H-Dirksen L. Bauman and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Printbegrænsninger: Der kan printes 10 sider ad gangen og max. 40 sider pr. session
Download or read book Country Reports on Human Rights Practices written by and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 1090 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2006 written by United States. Dept. of State and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 1908 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Pope Benedict XVI written by Stephen Mansfield and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2005-07-21 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes a new foreword on the resignation and legacy of Pope Benedict XVI. The sudden resignation of Pope Benedict XVI comes as the capstone to a papacy that that shocked some and delighted others. Pope Benedict was both an ardent intellectual and a driven traditionalist charged with leading a divided Catholic Church into a new era. In Pope Benedict XVI, bestselling author Stephen Mansfield tells the story of a youth who grew up in Nazi Germany and went from being a liberal theologian associated with Vatican II to a theological conservative who became Pope John Paul’s closest ally. As a cardinal, the outgoing pope pursued a firmly traditional path in the last quarter century: he excommunicated radical priests, cracked down on Marxist liberation theology in Latin America, and shaped some of John Paul’s more socially conservative positions. He also drew a line of distinction between Catholicism and other faiths, promulgating respect for—but not equality among— the historic religions. To some, Pope Benedict was the ultimate insider whose election ensured that the revolution of John Paul was rendered permanent in our century. Mansfield’s portrait of Pope Benedict was validated by recent history: Benedict XVI will be remembered as the Great Custodian. He sustained the return to tradition marked by John Paul. Pope Benedict XVI examines its subject specifically from the perspective of a non-Catholic—a committed Christian without fealty to Rome. Mansfield’s academic depth, his poetic but widely accessible writing style, and his ability to take complex religious ideas and make them understandable to the nonreligious make his treatment of Pope Benedict XVI significance for readers of all philosophies and faiths.
Download or read book Country Reports on Human Rights Practices For 2006 Vol 1 April 2008 110 2 Joint Committee Print S Prt 110 40 written by and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 1908 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Resources in Education written by and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book AF Press Clips written by United States Department of State. Bureau of African Affairs and published by . This book was released on 1982 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Political Violence Under the Swastika written by Peter H. Merkl and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-08 with total page 752 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Going to the active core of the Nazi revolt, this exciting psychological, sociological, and behavioral study is based on unique autobiographical stones supplied by over 500 pre-1933 rank-and-file Nazis. Peter Merkl's findings form the basis for a richer understanding of the political motivation of all extremist movements. Originally published in 1975. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
