A Comparative Study Of Language Variation In English And Chinese Netspeak

Netspeak, as a special language variation in the Internet environment, is the product of social development and a social and cultural phenomenon as well.Based on the theory of language variation and the co-variance theory of language and society in sociolinguistics, and with over 3000 netspeak data collected in this thesis, an attempt is made to compare English and Chinese netspeak at phonological, lexical and grammar level to find the differences and similarities between them. Besides, the socio-cultural factors causing these differences and similarities are discussed. According to the comparative study in this thesis, it is found that English and Chinese do share a similar process of variation in order to create the internet effect, such as the variation in pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. At each level of variation, they also have many common features, such as the common use of homophones and onomatopoeia in phonological variations, the similar lexical formation like shorting(abbreviation and acronyms), derivation, semantic change and borrowing words in lexical variation, and over-simplicity of sentence structure and conversion of part of speech in grammatical variation. Meanwhile, this study discovers the differences at each level of variation, for instance, homophones in Chinese netspeak are always more diversified than that in English because of the complex tonal feature in Chinese. The uses of reduplication are unique in Chinese netspeak.Furthermore, guided through the co-variance theory of society and language, the author finds that the differences between English and Chinese netspeak are related to their different socio-cultural background and tries to analyze the socio-cultural factors behind these differences of netspeak, which also further demonstrate the point “ society is primary, language is secondary” in co-variance theory of language and society.