Linguistic Features And Cultural Identity Of CIL In Internet Forum

As a newly born language variety of Chinese language, Chinese Internet Language (hereafter CIL) has attracted more and more attentions from linguists and scholars. However, CIL in Internet forums, which is one of the most important parts of CIL, has not been studied systematically. Grounded on the previous studies, this thesis takes CIL in Internet forum as the research object to explore its linguistic features and cultural identity in both qualitative and quantitative ways. In this thesis, data of CIL is mainly collected from Tianya community, one of the most influential Internet forums in China. A quantitative study is applied to analyze the linguistic features of CIL in Internet forum and the three-dimensional contextual network is adopted to discuss the factors that influence the linguistic characteristics of CIL in Internet forum.The research results reveal that CIL in Internet forum shows distinctive linguistic features. In phonological aspect, onomatopoeia and homophones are quite common, while in lexical aspect, technical terms, English loan words, dialect words as well as some newly created words can be found. Numbers and emoticons, short and straightforward sentences, out-of-ordinary usages are also quite popular in Internet forum. Besides, these peculiar usages are usually expressed in a spoken written style and a joking style. The reasons for these phenomena are mainly due to the scientific and socio-political development in China, the Internet users, or the netizens and their attitudes toward CIL. Moreover, since the majority netizens in China are young people, the CIL they use is usually filled with unique features of its users. Most CIL in Internet forums appear on the purpose of saving time and smoothing out online communication, while the others reflect the emotional and value orientation of the youth. Therefore, at the end of this thesis, it is pointed out that CIL in Internet forum reflects the users’cultural identity of being modern, unconventional and entertaining.