Population behaviors and language maintenance--a case of the Korean-speaking community in China.

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.