Dialect vitality and language attitudes within mass population movements in the Chinese Mainland

Abstract Mass population movements and the booming Internet have broken down geographical borders for languages and facilitated language contact, resulting in superdiversity of linguistic landscapes and challenges for maintaining minority languages. Given the extensive discussion regarding the relationship between language attitudes and language use, how language attitudes and language ecology within a country interact with the rapidly developing economy and mass population movements in the digital age remains underexplored. In this study, we conducted an online questionnaire survey about dialect vitality and language attitudes of citizens ( n = 1,162) in the Chinese mainland. We found that 1) vitality of the northern branch of Chinese dialects was higher than the southern branch; 2) as a factor related to dialect vitality, the relevance of language attitudes outperformed socioeconomic situations; 3) attitudes toward dialects differed mainly according to whether people migrated and had an emotional attachment to their dialects; and 4) respondents whose dialect vitality was weaker had stronger faith in maintaining their dialects in virtual spaces. These findings help us understand the relationships between language vitality, language attitudes, and socioeconomic development in the increasingly globalised and digital age.