Presenter: Liuxuan Wan

Title: Social Network Interaction and Attitudes Toward Minority Language Protection.

Type of Presentation: Oral

Abstract

This study aims to research how social network interactions and the frequency of contact with people using minority languages affect people's attitudes towards protecting minority languages in a multilingual city. As an international student living in a multilingual city, I really want to understand why, despite the significant role that minority languages play in cultural contexts, they receive little attention from people. In existing language-related research, it often focuses on mainstream languages such as English and Mandarin, or studies general second languages. However, there is relatively less attention paid to how daily social media interactions influence support for the protection of minority languages. Therefore, this study poses the following question: How does the frequency of contact with minority language communities on social networks shape an individual's attitude towards protecting minority languages? This oral presentation will use a mixed research method, using structured questionnaires, stratified random sampling methods, and semi-structured interviews to collect data from people living in multilingual cities and will employ statistical analysis to study the relationships between variables. I expect the results to show that more interactions and exposure to minority language communities will have a certain correlation with people's attitudes towards language protection.One limitation of this study is that it only focuses on online interactions and does not involve face-to-face communication.

Biography

Liuxuan Wan is a first-year student at Vantage Arts. For her capstone project, her research focuses on sociolinguistics and cultural diversity in multilingual environments. Besides her studies, she also enjoys dancing, making short videos, hanging out with friends, shopping or having coffee and chatting in cafes. Although she is striving to adapt to the pace of Vantage Arts and is trying her best to overcome numerous difficulties, she still hopes to transfer to the College of Science in the second year because she feels that she will be more interested in and better at science. Liuxuan believes that it's never too late to pursue what one truly desires. She plans to transfer to the College of Science in the second year and find an area she is interested in and complete her studies.