Linguistic distance and first migration destination choice among rural migrants in China

Regional linguistic differences may form informal boundaries in internal migration, yet their role in destination choice remains underexplored. This study examines linguistic distance as an origin–destination relational attribute in first migration destination choice among rural migrants in China. Using the China Migrants Dynamic Survey, the analysis matches first-migration information for 31,464 rural workers with city-level data, yielding 4,636,771 individual–alternative-city observations. Linguistic distance is constructed from the hierarchical structure of Chinese dialects and five minority languages using 2010 county-level registered-population weights. Conditional logit estimates show a significant negative association between linguistic distance and destination choice. The full-model odds ratio is 0.7901, indicating that a one-unit increase in linguistic distance is associated with a 20.99% reduction in relative odds. This association persists across alternative linguistic-distance measures, choice sets, sample restrictions and additional controls. The interaction between income disparity and linguistic distance is significantly negative, while the negative association with linguistic distance is weaker among new-generation migrants. These findings highlight linguistic boundaries within countries and show how linguistic relationships, economic disparities and migrant heterogeneity jointly inform internal migration destination choice.