The relationship between multilingual ability and poverty in Southwest China

1 Introduction

Language is a tool for communication and exchange, which has a fundamental role in poverty alleviation. Yunnan, Guangxi, and Tibet, all located on the southwest border of China, are the areas with the largest variety of ethnic minorities and are the deep poverty areas in the three regions and three prefectures of the country. Thus, they are the key areas of the national precision poverty alleviation work and the main battlefield for the national poverty eradication efforts.

Language contributes to poverty eradication, which has a special role in targeted poverty alleviation in Southwest China. There are many ethnic minorities in the border areas, and the language situation is complicated. Which ethnic minority mother tongues and other languages do people use? What role does multilingual language proficiency play in poverty alleviation, and what is its relationship with poverty? These questions are of great value to the study of the contribution of language in the process of social development, for the deep integration of the southwest border areas into “the Belt and Road Initiative” construction and for the completion of the task of poverty alleviation and the rural revitalization strategy.

China is a vast multi-ethnic country with 55 ethnic minorities, each with unique natural and social living environments, which are the creators of minority cultures, the inheritors of minority folklore, and the speakers of minority languages. From a linguistic perspective, the ability of ethnic minorities to master two or more languages, including their mother tongue, regional dialects, Mandarin Chinese, and foreign languages, China is a multi-ethnic and multilingual country (Dai 2007; Feng and Adamson 2009). Multilingual ability in this article refers to the ability of ethnic minority populations to master their mother tongue, Mandarin Chinese, local Chinese dialects, and foreign languages simultaneously, which is an important part of national language competence. Poverty in this article is based on the national rural poverty alleviation standard of 2,736 RMB yuan per capita net income of farmers in 2013 as the identification standard (Poverty Alleviation and Development Office of State Council 2014), and the shortfall amount of the documented poor households is the scope of poverty research.

This article took the following ethnic groups as the research subjects, i.e. Han Chinese and Lisu, Tibetan, Zhuang, Pumi, Naxi, Dai, and other ethnic minority groups’ documented poverty households in 34 border poverty counties in Yunnan, Guangxi, and Tibet, and explored the correlations between their multilingual ability and the cause of poverty in relation to monthly income and poverty. It is expected that this study will provide theoretical support and research examples for revitalizing rural language strategies in the post-poverty alleviation period.

2 Literature review

3 Research design

4 Results

5 Discussion

This study has the following three major findings. Firstly, the participants’ Mandarin Chinese ability and local Chinese dialect ability significantly and positively correlated with monthly household income, but the correlation strength was very weak. Secondly, ethnic minority language ability and English ability did not significantly correlate to monthly household income. The participants’ overall multilingual ability significantly and positively correlated with causes of poverty, which indicate that multilingual ability had an impact on the causes of poverty to some extent. Thirdly, the participants’ local Chinese dialect ability was a significant predictor of their monthly household income.

These findings are largely consistent with those of previous studies in the following three aspects. First, the local Chinese dialect ability was significantly and positively related to the monthly household income. Because of the lack of awareness of education, some ethnic minority groups in poor areas of Southwest China have disadvantaged educational backgrounds, and some of them are unwilling to speak or unable to speak Mandarin Chinese. In mixed living areas, they use the local Chinese dialect to communicate externally besides speaking their own ethnic mother tongue at home or in the village. This finding is consistent with that of Yingji and Zhang (2016) who stated that the higher the local Chinese language level is, the higher the income will be. 59.1% of the 13 ethnic minority populations had their ethnic mother tongue as their first language, 40.9% of the others had the local Chinese dialect as their first language, and the majority of the 59.1% ethnic mother tongue speakers had local Chinese dialect as their second language as well. Therefore, local Chinese dialect was the language of wider communication and it had a larger population of speakers. As a result, local Chinese dialect ability had become an important predictor of monthly household income of the participants. This result suggests that the lack of or weak local Chinese dialect ability may help explain poverty. Second, Mandarin Chinese (the national lingua franca) occupies a dominant position in poverty eradication and rural revitalization and is the most important part of multilingual competence, which is more effective in poverty eradication and rural revitalization for ethnic minorities (Wang 2018). Third, abilities in Mandarin Chinese, local Chinese dialects, ethnic minority languages, and English correlated to the causes of poverty (e.g. Guo 2018; He and Zhang 2017; Li 2019; Wang 2018), suggesting that the absence of multilingualism or weak multilingualism might lead to poverty.

However, the findings of this article’s quantitative questionnaire survey differ from those of previous studies in two aspects. Firstly, in terms of ethnic mother tongue ability, Bian et al. (2019) argued that the stronger the ethnic mother tongue ability, the higher the individual income. In contrast, in this article, we found that there was no significant relationship between the self-evaluation of ethnic mother tongue ability and monthly household income. This contrast may be mainly due to the following two reasons: first, the level of the ethnic mother tongue ability was not high. Usually, poor ethnic minorities live in mountainous areas and border regions, and their ethnic mother tongue is their first language, but the proportion of proficient language ability was 32.7%, and the number of people in the average and the poor language levels was even higher. Second, the ethnic mother tongue is not widely used, and the two most used occasions for ethnic mother tongue use were communication with family members, accounting for 48.4% and communication with the same ethnic group, rating 51.3%, while the local Chinese dialect and Mandarin Chinese were mostly used in situations such as going to government departments, shopping at the market, going on business trips or working as migrant workers in cities. However, the interview data of this study suggest that, in fact, the stronger the ethnic mother tongue ability of some ethnic groups, the higher the monthly household income. There are 16 cross-border ethnic groups in Yunnan Province, and they are Dai, Zhuang, Miao, Jingpo, Yao, Hani, De’ang, Wa, Lahu, Yi, Achang, Lisu, Buyi, Nu, Bulang, and Dulong. A large number of cross-border ethnic groups in Yunnan have had some close ethnic kinship with the people of neighboring countries, which is a basis for developing friendly relations between China and its neighbors. The mother tongues of these ethnic groups play a special advantage in border trade, and these ethnic groups have higher incomes than those who do not speak the cross-border ethnic mother tongues. Secondly, as for English ability, Li (2019), Wang (2018), Guo (2018), and Zhang (2008), argued that the stronger the foreign language ability, the higher the annual income of the individual, and that improving foreign language ability helps to get out of poverty. However, the finding of this article indicates no significant correlation between self-evaluated English ability and monthly household income.

The years of education per capita of ethnic minorities in the southwest border areas are lower than the average of the region, mainly because education is seriously lagging behind, resulting in poor performance in secondary and high school exams, and English ability is often weak or absent for poor ethnic minority groups and poor families. There are two reasons for this, firstly, the participants feel that the better their English scores are, the more able they are to continue to go to school, but then their families lack labor, and so, going to school and lacking labor is one of the main reasons for poverty; secondly, English is the weakest subject in primary and secondary schools, and some students lose the opportunity to continue their schooling and further education because of their poor English scores. This makes it difficult for the participants to obtain effective education, an inability to learn advanced technology, and frustration in going out to work or do business, making their families become poor again or return to poverty. Maybe another reason for this result is that the participants are students from the documented households, and usually their English ability is very weak and they also rated their English ability very low. Therefore, the statistic discriminability is very small and a significant correlation did not emerge between their English ability and monthly household income.

However, when interviewing the households, mostly the parents, the research team found that the majority of respondents believed that the better their children’s English scores were, the more opportunities they would have to go to university. Although the family might be poor due to lack of labor, once the child graduates from college and has a regular job, there is a hope to get out of poverty. According to the data from the households interviewed, families with one secondary, college, or bachelor’s degree graduate have been lifted out of poverty in recent years. This shows that the poverty brought by English learning is temporarily short and it can also explain the phenomenon that there was no correlation between the participants’ foreign language ability and their monthly household income.

6 Conclusion

This article explores the multilingual ability, occasions for language use, and attitudes towards the importance of language of the documented poor households, as well as the correlation between the language ability and monthly household income. It finds that: (1) As for multilingual ability, the participants rated their ethnic minority language ability first, local Chinese dialect second, Mandarin Chinese third, and English last. (2) In regard to the occasions for language use, they spoke their ethnic minority language at home and in the village, local Chinese dialect at the town or county seat, and Mandarin Chinese outside of the county seat or work out of the province. (3) In terms of attitudes towards the importance of language, they regarded Mandarin Chinese as first, local Chinese second, English third, and their ethnic minority language last. (4) As for the relationship between the language ability and monthly household income, Mandarin Chinese ability and local Chinese dialect ability correlated with the income of the documented households, and ethnic minority language and English ability correlated with household income to some degree.

Through the above analysis, this article concludes that multilingual ability can play a role in the documented poor households’ incomes and employment under certain conditions. By emphasizing the role of language in rural revitalization, bringing the utility of each language into play, and reasonably developing ethnic minority language resources, this article seeks to provide a practical basis for exploring language-facilitated poverty alleviation and language-facilitated rural revitalization in China. First of all, multilingual education should be promoted based on education in the national common language (Mandarin Chinese). From the results of the survey, the situation of mastering Mandarin Chinese is not optimistic, and the proportions of average and poor ratings of Mandarin Chinese were 46.2% and 8.1% respectively, which is still a very large proportion, and the task of popularizing and improving common language education is very difficult. Secondly, the use of ethnic mother tongue is declining and the range was relatively narrow in the survey, but mother tongues are associated with the presence of spiritual and emotional influences on the level of poverty. They have a calming effect on the mind and play an important role in the cognitive world of ethnic minorities. Thirdly, local Chinese dialects have different economic values in different regions. The positive effect of dialects on the income of ethnic minorities in the survey suggests that local Chinese dialect ability is a medium for gaining a sense of psychological equality and is very important for active integration into municipal life. Lastly, as far as foreign languages are concerned, English, Vietnamese, Thai, and Burmese are important regional international communication tools and cultural vehicles, and they are important economic resources in Southwest China. Since foreign languages are key gateways to enter universities for ethnic minority students of the documented poor households, they lead to higher levels of wage and business income after graduation. Strengthening positive attitudes and ability to use foreign languages is essential for integration with the world in the long run.

Although this study only represents the cases of 34 border region counties in Southwest China, multilingualism and multilingual education are special propositions in China, and the impact of multilingual ability especially on the poverty of ethnic minority populations is worthy of deep consideration. It is urgent to study the relationship between multilingual ability and poverty in more areas so as to fully implement the task of promoting universal education to help the rural revitalization in the post-poverty eradication era. Poverty is one of the most serious problems of the twenty-first century, and the eradication of poverty is still the mission of all humanity. The accomplishment of targeted poverty reduction in China does not mean that poverty has been completely eradicated; poverty in the post-poverty alleviation period or in the rural revitalization still deserves attention, and language-assisted poverty eradication in the Chinese context has a long way to go.