Study On The History Of The Transformation Of Popular Usage Of Language On The Internet(Internet Slangs) In The Past Twenty Years In China

The emerging popularity of internet slangs has escorted the development of the Chinese Internet industry for the past 20 years. Started from being misunderstood by the public, internet slangs have gradually integrated into people’s lives, with some gaining approval and acceptance by the official spoken and written language system. These internet slangs are, consciously and unconsciously, changing people’s ways of language expression and ways of socialising, as well as the ways with which information are obtained; they even have impact on people’s life style and have great influence on public reaction to social events. As a result, not only could the transformation of internet slangs reflect the growth of the Chinese internet industry, it also reveals in a sense the changes of the social living in China. Therefore, researching on the history of the transformation of internet slangs in the past 20 years in China in a systematic manner is of great importance not only to the developmental needs of Chinese language but also to the documentation of Chinese contemporary history and social development.Commencing the research on the development of internet slangs in terms of the transformation of technology and carriers, this study chooses the year of 1994 as a starting point and concludes that the development of internet slangs could be categorised into three-stages including, namely, the starting stage(from the year 1994 to 2002), the growing stage(from the year 2003 to 2007), and the rising stage(from the year 2008 to 2013). The starting stage is the initiating and fostering stage for internet slangs. It is also the stage in which the entertaining aspect to internet slangs start to develop. During the growing stage, the focus on internet slangs evolves to address the social networking function through the internet as well as its interconnectedness and its relationship with social living off the internet. The rising stage witnesses the surfacing of the watchdog role and function of internet slangs with a vision for a multivariant and dynamic development in the media field.On the other hand, this study explores the linguistic motives and patterns of popular usage of internet slangs using a cross-disciplinary approach which utilises linguistic, media, and cultural studies. It also analyzes the interactive relationship between the propagation property of internet slangs and the mass culture within the context of the wholly-media age.This study takes advantage of the strengths of existing research paradigms by utilising archival research method and case study method, combined with historical and theoretical analysis as well as quantitative and qualitative analysis.Considering the great needs for longitudinal comparison and the integrity of a completed history of Chinese internet vocabulary, this dissertation uses the development of the Chinese internet industry as references for analyzing the transformation of internet slangs. One innovation of this dissertation worth mentioning is that the researcher pioneered a comprehensive documentation of the process and panorama of the birth and growth of internet slangs in the last 20 years in China which has filled in the blank of this less researched field of macro-level research on internet slangs. In the methodological sense, it is also different from other studies which only focus on a particular internet slang, or slangs of a certain type, or internet slangs appeared in a particular period of time; rather, this study makes the effort to systematically document and explore the features and patterns of development of internet slangs with consideration to the change of time and the transformation of carriers.