Abstract：Rural revitalization is closely associated with rural people’s linguistic well-being. The urgent task for academics is to understand the reality of language life in rural China. This study reports a field survey of language use, attitudes, and challenges in a Tibetan village, Zhongzha, in Litang County, western Sichuan Province. Zhongzha is multilingual, where Tibetan, Chinese, and English, in order of frequency of use, are spoken. The use of Tibetan language involves a complex relationship among its dialects and Buddhist Tibetan, and Chinese has two varieties: Putonghua and Sichuan dialect, but the use of English is limited. The fieldwork uncovered multitudes of the villagers’ language attitudes. The villagers demonstrated different attitudes to the use of Buddhist Tibetan, Tibetan dialects, and Putonghua. They also showed different attitudes regarding learning Chinese, Tibetan, and English. The fieldwork also found language challenges to villagers’ well-beings. They faced language barriers in travel, medical care, and online exchanges. Zhongzha village is located in the key area in China’s rural revitalization strategy and is a sample of villages in western China. Viewing the case of multilingual Zhongzha in terms of Bourdieu’s social theory about the linguistic market and the power of information, we suggest increasing efforts in the popularization of the national standard language and script in order to eliminate the villagers’ language barriers in three measures. First, villagers’ basic ability in listening, speaking, reading and writing Chinese should be cultivated to meet their language needs in daily life. The second is to develop villagers’ language information processing ability, giving priority to solving their most concerned, most direct, and most realistic language needs in their well-being. The third is to train and cultivate role models so that they may lead villagers in rural economic and cultural revitalization.
赵春燕. 乡村振兴视域下理塘县中扎村的语言生活[J]. 语言战略研究, 2022, 7(1): 36-47.
Zhao Chunyan. The Language Life of Zhongzha Village in Litang County from the Perspective of Rural Revitalization. , 2022, 7(1): 36-47.
