A Review on the Study of Sociolinguistics in China

Chinese sociolinguistics based on the study of the native language life in China was born in 1983.As far as the discipline is concerned,there have been regular sociolinguistics conferences since the 1980s.Most of important achievements have been seen in the language situation,language variation and variety,language and culture,language contact,bilingualism and bidialectism,code-switching,immigrants’language,endangered languages,speech communication,and language planning.Many sociolinguistic topics will become academic frontiers in China in the near future such as the local varieties of putonghua,the ethnic variety of the Chinese language,language and national identity,dialect and local identity,minority language and ethnic identity,the English-Chinese bilingual use,the language situation,and multilingual service and so on.