Abstract
This research addresses an important set of social scientific issues—how language maintenance between dominant and vernacular varieties of speech—also known as dialects—are conditioned by increasingly globalized mass media industries that are created by them and accompany them. In particular, it examines how the television series and film industries (as an outgrowth of the mass media) related to social dialectology help maintain and promote one regional variety of speech over the other. The value of this thesis is ultimately judged by its contribution to the sociolinguistic literature. All of these issues and data addressed in the current study have the potential to make a contribution to the current understanding of social dialectology literature—a sub-branch of sociolinguistics—particularly with respect to the language maintenance literature. The researcher adopts a multi-method approach (literature review, interviews and observations) to collect and analyze data. The research is found support to confirm two positive correlations: the number of production of dialectal television series (and films) and the distribution of the dialect in question, as well as the number of dialectal speakers and the maintenance of the dialect under investigation.
Highlights
IntroductionOver the past 30 or more years, this question has been predominantly approached by means of sociolinguistic measures such as a domain-based questionnaire—a language-use survey—to obtain self-reported language-use (quantitative) data across various functional and communicative domains (e.g., Gal, 1978; Smith-Hefner, 2009; Mukherjee and David, 2011; to name but a few), aimed to measure the respondents’ vitality perceptions of the language in question
A fundamental question of social science is what makes some languages and/or dialects more powerful than others and what are reasons behind such a difference? Over the past 30 or more years, this question has been predominantly approached by means of sociolinguistic measures such as a domain-based questionnaire—a language-use survey—to obtain self-reported language-use data across various functional and communicative domains (e.g., Gal, 1978; Smith-Hefner, 2009; Mukherjee and David, 2011; to name but a few), aimed to measure the respondents’ vitality perceptions of the language in question
The difference lies in the fact that the relatively more powerful Chinese dialects have more number of dialectal speaking populations than the less powerful ones, among other factors
Summary
Over the past 30 or more years, this question has been predominantly approached by means of sociolinguistic measures such as a domain-based questionnaire—a language-use survey—to obtain self-reported language-use (quantitative) data across various functional and communicative domains (e.g., Gal, 1978; Smith-Hefner, 2009; Mukherjee and David, 2011; to name but a few), aimed to measure the respondents’ vitality perceptions of the language in question. Others conduct the quantitative survey to elicit language-attitude data among majority or minority speech community members toward a particular language (e.g., Sallabank, 2013). Following the recent trend of the aforementioned sociolinguistic research, this study examines the role of mass media (major factor) and the number of dialectal speakers (minor factor) in conditioning linguistic variation by means of qualitative approaches (e.g., literature review, interview and observation) rather than quantitative measures (e.g., a questionnaire survey). In addition to the terms of ‘varieties’ of regional speech customarily translated into English as ‘dialects,’ it is www.ccsen et.org/ass
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