Sustain Our World & Maintain Our Words — Correlation Between Ecological Environment and Diversity of Chinese Dialects

The existing research on linguistic ecology mainly focuses on the impact of social environment on the internal ecology of language, and rarely studies the impact of natural environment on the external ecology of language from a macro perspective. This paper integrates the social environment and natural environment, together called ecological environment, and extracts ecological factors such as species number, forest area, traditional village number, population, district area and GDP for statistics. By analyzing the relationship between the diversity of Chinese dialects in China’s 34 provincial administrative regions and the ecological factors, it tries to find out which ecological factor has a significant correlation, thus, the ecological causes of the diversity of Chinese dialects are obtained. This study aims to reveal the importance of ecological environment to Chinese dialects diversity, providing reference data for dealing with problems of language endangerment, and promoting the sustainable development of language and culture. The results indicate: forest area, number of traditional villages, population and district area are weakly related to the number of Chinese dialects in the corresponding region; and there is no correlation between number of species, GDP and number of Chinese dialects in the corresponding region.