Language evolution and ethnic group/dialect name affecting ethnic information processing: Three major Chinese dialects in Guangdong

Abstract

<p id="p00010">There are three major dialects in Guangdong: Cantonese, Chaoshan, and Hakka. These dialects mainly formed during the southward migration of the Han people in the Central Plains, but they are different in language source, evolution history, and name. From the perspective of language itself, the Hakka dialect is the smallest variation of Mandarin, Cantonese medium, and Chaoshan the largest. In terms of language-variation completion time, the Hakka dialect occurred most recently, followed by Cantonese, with Chaoshan occurring the earliest. Regarding the dialect names, a morpheme of “Ke” exists in the name Hakka, which always reminds its speakers that their ancestors are from the Central Plains, while Cantonese and Chaoshan are named after each locality. An interesting question has been whether these differences among the three dialects affect the speaker’s information processing of the Central Plains group. <p id="p00015">Guangdong college students who speak only one dialect of Hakka, Cantonese, and Chaoshan were grouped according to their language background in the present study. One hundred and eighty participants took part in two experiments, 90 per experiment. In experiment 1, the group reference R/K paradigm was used to investigate whether speakers of different dialects had a different memory effect on the Central Plains group compared with that on an unrelated group. Experiment 2 adopted the “starting stroop paradigm”; that is, using different group names as the starting stimulus, and personality adjectives with different valences as target stimuli, the participants were asked to judge the color of the target stimuli. <p id="p00020">Experiment 1 found that the participants had a superior memory of their own group, but only Hakka dialect speakers experienced a group reference effect on the information processing of the Central Plains group, which resulted in a better memory effect on the Central Plains group than that on the unrelated group. The results of experiment 2 showed that the participants had the longest reaction time under the condition that their own ethnic group name was activated, but only the Hakka participants responded more slowly to the Henan ethnic group than to the unrelated ethnic group. The results of both experiments indicated that all the three dialect groups had processing advantages regarding the information of their own groups that manifested in the obvious referential effect of their own groups and the attention bias of their own information. Moreover, the Hakka participants’ cognition regarding the Central Plains group represented by “Henan people” is significantly different from that of Cantonese and Chaoshan dialect speakers. <p id="p00025">The research results suggested that language evolution affected ethnic information processing. The identity of ethnic groups with the same ancestry could be enhanced by keeping the characteristics of ancestral language completely and strengthening the relationship between dialect and ancestral language. The results have important implications for the construction of Chinese Community Consciousness.