Netspeak: A New Social Dialect

With the development of Internet, increasing people have paid attention to thespecial language use on Internet context. This special language type is Internet languagedefined as Netspeak by David Crystal. It is different from standard language type bothin vocabulary and communication, and will influence traditional language deeply.Language is a social behavior in nature, and is ever-changing with developmentof society. So are the vocabulary and communicative features. Netspeak is considered asa language type that is used on Internet. In order to meet the needs in onlinecommunication, Netizen create their own language, which in nature is a languagevariety with special speech community: a social dialect. Netspeak embodies the socialfeatures of language users and communicative context, thus this paper defines Netspeakas a new social dialect and discusses its language features.In order to give a scientific definition to the nature of Netspeak, this paperintroduces the concept of social dialect and some other theories in sociolinguistics, andexplores why Netspeak can be taken as a social dialect. This paper points out thatNetspeak has its special users and communicative situation, which coincides with thetwo features of social dialect, and then gives an overall analysis of the expressivefunction and variation trends in Netspeak. Then, this paper systematically discusses thenarrow level Netspeak: BBS and chat language. A large number of materials have beenaccumulated to analyze the communicative feature and word-formation both in Englishand Chinese BBS vocabulary, between which similarities are summarized to imply thatBBS language in different cultural contexts can be taken as a variety of Netspeak. Afterthat, the cooperative principle and politeness maxims in pragmatics are used to explorethe features in chat language, where QQ chat language is chosen to be the mainlanguage material resource. Through careful observation and detailed analysis, thewriter analyzes the chat record from the selected chat sample, compares the differencesof QQ chat language from traditional chat in order to explain online chat language in amore scientific way, and then discusses the restricting factors of QQ chat in conversations, and also explores its communicative principle with Gricean·s cooperativeprinciple and politeness maxims, and finally summarizes some vocabulary features thatare different from standard language.It is hoped that a study on Netspeak can help to clear the thread of developmentof Internet culture and explore the difference of Internet language from traditional typein order to make netizen understand Netspeak better so that they can improve theirlanguage proficiency, communication ability and Internet civilization awareness.Netspeak cannot be simply considered as an oral or written type language because eachvariety in Netspeak has different language features. So an analysis on Netspeak in socialperspective is quite necessary.