城市语言调查

Urban Language Studies

大规模、高速度的城市化进程带来新的语言问题,与此同时,社会语言生活的变化改变了语言学的实证基础。面对研究对象的变化及其对语言学理论的挑战,一批中国社会语言学家开创了城市语言调查这一新的研究方向。经过数年的发展,城市语言调查确立了比较明确的理论和方法。城市语言调查依据的主要理论是言语社区理论,探索社区在语言的形成和发展中的作用。城市语言调查强调客观、全面地调查研究城市语言状况,反对依靠个别人主观判断的研究方式。产生于21世纪中国的"城市语言调查"目前已成为国际化的语言学新动向。

Urban Language Studies （ULS） make up a new area of research in sociolinguistics.The research efforts focusing on the ″urban″ nature of the languages today,which originated in China at the turn of the century,are now increasingly joined internationally.The large-scale,high-speed urbanization process taking place in China provides testing grounds for the new theories and methods of ULS.Among the theories,Speech Community Theory proposes the primacy of community over language and the interaction basis of community-formation,which explains the emergence of new speech communities on the basis of industrial immigrant population.Urban languages are highly variable,adaptive,and multi-normed,in sharp contrast with what is found in a small,close-knit rural community.To study urban languages,traditional linguistic approaches depending on introspection,retrospection and individual observations are no longer valid.Instead,the methods generally adopted in social researches such as random sampling,structural observations and controlled experiments are used with good results.