THE ANALYSIS OF FACTORS CONTRIBUTING TO HERITAGE LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE — A SURVEY ON LANGUAGE SITUATION OF STUDENTS IN BLCU

Abstract

In China, for most researchers, there is a discrepancy between promoting Mandarin and conserving heritage language. The study, by using survey scales and interview and data collected from randomly selected 40 participants, addresses the question what are the factors contributing to dialect maintenance of students on the individual, familial, school and community level. It was concluded that there is a series of factors that correlate with students’ dialect use and maintenance from internal and external point of view, which considers four different levels: Individual, family, school and community. Future research will extend to the experiment to testify the opinion of this paper.