| As one of the most remarkable scientific inventions in the20thcentury, the Internethas greatly influenced various aspects of people’s lives, and brought us a brand newInternet culture at the same time. With the popularity and prevalence of computertechnology, an increasing number of people communicate with each other on the Internet,thus netspeak is emerging in this context. This distinctive language variation, whichderivates from the standard language, has been popular with the netizens. As the netspeakis widely replicated and transmitted on the Internet, it is also increasingly penetrating intopeople’s everyday communication, which has drawn the attention of scholars both athome and abroad. However, a lot of researches mainly focus on the collection,intuitionistic explanation and description of the netspeak materials, but rarely study theclassification, replication and transmission of netspeak. Nevertheless, it is helpful tounderstand the causes and development of netspeak by studying the replication andtransmission mechanism of this language variation. Hence, the present research is quitenecessary.Memetics, a newly developed theory based on Darwin’s theory of evolution, ismainly used to interpret the cultural evolution. As the pioneer of memetics, Dawkinspoints out that its essence lies in meme, which is also the basic unit of the transmission ofculture. Language, as the carrier of cultural information, is itself the element of culture.In other words, language itself is a kind of meme. Therefore, memetics can provide apowerful theoretical support for the study on the replication and transmission ofnetspeak.Based on those previous studies, the present research makes use of memetics andadopts the observation and qualitative methods together to analyze the collected netspeakmaterials and probe into the features, classifications, replication and transmission of netspeak. The research subject is the Chinese netspeak in the Chinese Internet context.Firstly, through the description method, we discuss the five prominent features of thislanguage variation—Chinese netspeak, namely, novelty, simplicity, productiveness,vividness and rapid updatability; then according to the genotype and phenotype criteriarespectively, comprehensive classifications of the Chinese netspeak have been made; atthe same time, we conclude the three ways and various modes of the replication andtransmission of Chinese netspeak from the perspective of memetics.The present study shows that netspeak is a kind of language memes which isreplicated and transmitted by imitating. In fact, the emergence of various Chinesenetspeak is the result of the unceasing replication and transmission of language memes.Therefore, we hope that this memetic research on Chinese netspeak can shed some lightson people’s understanding, utilization and even creation of netspeak. |
