LANGUAGE MONITORING STUDY IN CHINA: PRACTICE AND REFLECTION

Zhao Shiju
National Institute of Chinese Language Matters and Social Development, Wuhan University, People’s Republic of China

Annotation

The monitoring of language life has a long history in China. Since the beginning of the 21st century, efforts have been made to establish research institutions, build platforms and research teams in order to monitor the language life in present-day China. Remarkable achievements have been made on a continuous, large-scale and regular basis, and a backbone team named “Language Life School” has also been formed, both of which have played an important role in serving relevant national policy-making, social life and academic studies.

After the summary of language monitoring practices, the paper further explored the rules and theories so as to boost the development of language monitoring as a discipline. Seven main perspectives and four basic characteristics of language monitoring study have been generalized, and eight issues requiring further study have been discussed as well, including determination of boundaries and focuses, identification of authenticity and validness, cyberspace monitoring, formulation of rules and theories, improvement of technologies, means, approaches and research systems, mechanisms for the prediction and early warning of language situations and so on.

Keywords：language monitoring, language life, language situation, “Language Life School”, language policy in China

For citation: Zhao Shiju. Language monitoring study in China: practice and reflection. Sociolinguistics, 2020, no. 3(3) [online], pp. 70–82.

DOI: 10.37892/2713-2951-2020-3-3-70–82