A Contrastive Study of the Linguistic Variants in English Folk Songs and Yao Folk Songs

Abstract

As a unique symbol system, the human language is used to express people’s thoughts and feelings, carrying out the task of interpersonal communication. However, due to the different nation’s thinking ways, languages from different countries can be much different. For example, English generally emphasizes the separation of time and space, while Chinese lays emphasis on the homomorphism of time and space. That is why English folk songs and Yao folk songs, though typically rap arts created spontaneously by the working people, reveal great individuality from their own thoughts. Apart from the differences in language category, other differences are characterized by grammatical structure, syntactic structure, situational context, voice and mood etc. In order to better understand these two folk songs, this article aims at analyzing the language variants from vocabulary, syntax, word order and structure in both English folk songs and Yao folk songs, so that the interpretation for these language variants in the two folk songs can be deduced in synchronic as well as diachronic dimensions. Moreover, now that these language variants occur within a single language system, it is obvious that they do not affect their own coexistence and people’s reception effects.