作者:校园英语杂志社 字数:3385 点击:

  Although Chinese culture is a complete unity, it shows great diversity in regional culture including languages because of its large population and numerous nationalities. In recent years, dialects, as an important representative of culture, are becoming increasingly popular among economists because of its non-negligible impact on economics. Also, the various types of Chinese dialects has provided a good data sample to econometric. Therefore, this article makes a conclusion about the present research on the impact of dialects in three levels, that is labor force, enterprise and macroeconomic.
  At the level of labor force, dialect diversity will influence the social relations and individual ability of labor force, thus affecting their income and work quality. Ma Shuang et al. (2018) studied the influence of dialect diversity in migrant areas on the accumulation of social capital of migrant workers, and found that dialect diversity reduces the income level of workers by impeding the development of their social network. Cheng Bo(2017) found that language diversity reduced the quality of analysts’ earnings forecast, while the education level of employees would weaken the negative impact of language diversity on the quality of analysts’ earnings forecast. And the key to this problem is to improve Mandarin. By analyzing the data of Chinese Family Panel Studies (CFPS) and China Labor and Dynamics Survey (CLDS), Chen Yuanyuan (2016) finds that one’s improvement in Mandarin, including listening and speaking, can approximately increase his income by 3%-4% among the floating population with different dialects in service industries.
  However, the ability to speak a certain dialect can bring workers several advantages in the region of that dialect, such as the improvement in wages of the migrant workers that can speak Shanghai’s dialect in Shanghai’s sales-related service industries (Chen et al.,2014). The reason for the benefit is that an identical dialect not only breaks communication barriers, but also shows cultural identity, making local consumers trust them more with a similar cultural background. According to Liu Yuyun (2015), the diversity in dialects also blocks labor mobility, showing an inverted U relationship, and in turn impedes the integration of markets. Also, the similarity in dialects can improve the management efficiency (Dai Yiyi, 2017) and merger performance.
  At the enterprise level,, the diversity of dialects will lead to the decline of internal efficiency, but some studies have shown that it is beneficial to the innovation output. Milliken and Maetins (1996) analyzed the micro impact of diversity at the enterprise level and found that diversity reduced the cohesion of the team and increased the cost of cooperation. Parrotta et al. (2012) used enterprise samples to find that age and ethnic diversity lower the production capacity of enterprises. However, Pan Yue (2017) used the number of urban dialects and dialect differentiation index to measure regional cultural diversity, and empirically studied its impact on enterprise innovation. The results showed that in regions with more diverse cultures, private high-tech enterprises would gain more innovative output.