Analisi sociolinguistica dell'inglese come lingua franca in Shanghai, Cina: Percezioni esterne e realtà sociolinguistiche.

Considering researcher's experience as an expatriate living and working in Shanghai, and the acknowledgement of other foreigners' linguistic choices and opinions, this thesis investigates the sociolinguistic realities of language use and language attitudes in China's most cosmopolitan city, Shanghai. A sociolinguistic survey was conducted involving 60 participants, among these 53 foreigners and 7 Chinese people, who live and work in Shanghai. The only requirement that was specified in the recruitment of participants was that they had to be exposed to English on daily basis. In addition to this survey, interviews and informal participants observation were also employed as research instruments to collect the data for this study. Therefore, this study specifically aimed at describing, the main social traits of the people who live in Shanghai, the use of the English language as a lingua franca, as well as the attitudes of people towards English in comparison with the official local language, Chinese and other languages (people's native languages). English and Chinese were considered in a number of contexts: first, the context of language use at work, with friends, and in people's leisure time; second, the perception of people's improvements, level of comfortably and difficulties on the use of English and Chinese; and third, people's attitudes towards the use of English as a lingua franca in comparison with Chinese. The findings of the study indicate that the greatly superior use of English by foreigners in Shanghai has an impact on the ways these people are using different languages to negotiate their everyday lives. As Shanghai is becoming a more international city and moving towards more modern standards, more expatriates will arrive in the city increasing the amount of English exposure.