Original scientific paper
Population Behaviors and Language Maintenance – A Case of the Korean- Speaking Community in China
Qingsheng Zhou
Abstract
With the regard to language maintenance, one of the most successful in over fifty of
ethno-linguistic communities in China is the Korean community with more than two
millions of Korean-speakers, in which there have been Regulations Regarding the Ethnic
Language Use, and a maintenance-orientated and bilingual education system. However,
language attrition comes to be occurring in the Korean community because more
than two hundred thousands of Korean-speaking migrants have streamed from the Korean-
rural community to the Chinese-urban community for the last twenty years. This
paper, in urban-anthropological and sociolinguistic perspectives, is aiming at an analysis
of the cause of population moves and the urbanization process of the Korean community
as well as their impact on the language maintenance and bilingual education in
the Korean community. It is mainly divided into four sections, namely, (1) the situation
of Korean-speaking community; (2) the problem of language maintenance; (3) the impact
of Korean-speakers moves on language maintenance; (4) the impact of negative
growth of population, and (5) the impact of uneven ratio of female population.
Keywords
language maintenance; Korean; China; bilingual education
Hrčak ID:
27954
URI
Publication date:
24.6.2004.
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