This study adopted a questionnaire survey and group interviews to investigate the language adaptation of migrant workers’ children from Grade 1 to 6 in a Nanjing primary school. The study found that such children show a 3stage development mode in language adaptation behavior: students of Grade 12 will try to align to the Mandarin Chinese teachers’ accent; students of Grade 34 attach implicit prestige to local accent and will try to adapt to the city dialect; students of Grade 56 highlight personal identity and gradually construct an awareness of their hometown mother tongue, and the accent of active members from the same hometown become the object of language adaptation. This paper analyzes the above findings with sociolinguistic theory, concluding that: (1) low grade students are unfamiliar with the dominant city dialect, and lack deep understanding among classmates, so they move closer to the teachers’ classroom speech; (2) intermediate grade students begin to admire the city dialect and the use of urban dialect by some teachers on the campus promotes the urban dialect; (3) students of the senior grade gradually develop their own selfidentity and try to find “country folks” and form small campus social networks with the means of mother tongue accent, resulting in language adaptation with a new direction.

children of migrant workers; dialect; Mandarin; language identity; language adaptation