Foreign Students In Shanghai Shanghai Language Attitude Survey Report

Non-local residents’ attitude towards the local dialects, as an important partof the residents’ linguistic life, is a key issue in the study of sociolingusitics in China.In this paper, we focused on the attitude of non-local university students in Shanghaito the Shanghai dialect, as a case in point to show what the non-local elite group’sattitude to the local dialect can be. Using questionnaires and SPSS for data collectionand analysis, we investigated the language attitude of around500subjects from4universities in different districts of Shanghai, ranging from first-year undergraduatesto Ph.D. students. We found that most of the subjects, except for those from aroundShanghai, are unable to speak and unwilling to learn the Shanghai dialect. We alsofound correlations between the subjects’ language attitude and their age, gender,length of stay in Shanghai, willingness to settle down in the future and so on tovarying degrees.