Dialect and Social Trust

Huang Jiuli, Liu Chang

Journal of Finance and Economics Vol. 43, Issue 07, pp. 83 - 94 (2017)  DOI:10.16538/j.cnki.jfe.2017.07.007

Abstract

As one of important carriers of regional culture, dialect is an important factor affecting economic performance; however, existing research reveals the economic consequences of dialect as a cultural form, but does not elaborate how dialect affects the economy. This paper takes social trust as a channel of understanding the effect of dialect on economic performance, and investigates empirically the impact of dialect on social trust based on China comprehensive social survey database. It comes to the following conclusions:firstly, among strangers, the use of the same dialect is beneficial to the construction of trust, namely dialect can affect the formation of social trust; secondly, dialect can affect social trust because it can be used as identification symbols of people's place of origin, thereby enhancing each other's sense of identity; thirdly, the effect of dialect on social trust has the heterogeneity, and it differs somewhat with not only individual education, urban development and urban population structure but also regions. This paper provides a micro explanation of the effect of dialect on economic performance from a perspective of social trust.

Keywords

dialect concentration; social trust; culture; social capital