An Investigation On Bilingual Harmony In Ethnic Area From The Perspective Of Eco-linguistics

Eco-linguistics, a new concept in linguistics, views a language as a species, aiming to study the interaction between language and environment. Language ecosystem is a dynamic and balanced system where a variety of languages coexists and interacts with social environment(Huang Zhichang & Shu Jiesheng, 2004). A sound language ecosystem has important significance for the survival and development of a language. Language, like all living things in the world, has different process of development, maturity and decline. Language contact and contradiction, the mutual influence and infiltration between different languages are just as the life and death struggle between animals where the advantageous language will be well preserved, and the language at disadvantage will be dying(Liu Runqing, 1995). From the perspective of eco-linguistics, the concept of bilingualism can be interpreted as competition and co-existence of languages(Liu Jia, 2013). With the combined effect of the external ecological factors and internal ecological factors, the two different language species influence each other in language communities and establish a symbiotic relationship.Chinese, as a dominant language, with its popularity, has made numerous ethnic minority languages marginalized or put them into danger or death, to which more and more sociologists, linguists and progressives have paid attention. That some minority languages are becoming endangered or even extinct has destroyed the linguistic diversity. Yunnan is a multi-ethnic and multi-lingual province, in which there has long existed various complicated language relations. In the development of Yunnan Province, the main trend of language relations is harmonious(Dai Qingxia, 2013). The research into language harmony is not only of great theoretical value of scientific research, but also provides a useful basis for working out the language policies. For this reason, this study takes a Bai ethnic group as the research subject attempting to investigate the language harmony in the community from the ecolinguistc perspective.A questionnaire was used to elicit information on Bai people’s language use in seven communicative domains and their attitude toward Bai language, Hanyu and PTH in the town of Xizhou, Dali Prefecture in Yunnan Province of China. Xizhou is a town of the typical Bai community, where Bai ethnic group has long lived there for generations. The results show that Bai and Han languages both co-exist in a balanced and harmonious way in the town of Xizhou, and play their own roles in different contexts. Second, home domain is indeed the stronghold of minority community language as Bai language is the preferred language of communication across three generations in the family, which reinforces the use, proficiency and transmission of the Bai language. Third, besides the strong identification of their ethnic language, Bai people hold a positive attitude toward Chinese.Along with the frequent language contact of Bai-Han language, the need of socioeconomic development and an increasing amount of families with exogamous marriages, Bai language will long coexist with Hanyu and realize its own functions in different communicative contexts. The harmonious bilingual life in Xizhou is one pattern of linguistic relations of ethnic minorities in China, so it has certain representativeness. The language harmony in Xizhou is beneficial for dealing with the linguistic relations between Hanyu and minority languages or among multi-national languages.