Linguistic Identification Of University Students Towards Internet Language

“Cyber language”, also known as Netspeak, is an internet communication tool widelyused and spread by netizens in the virtue world, a product of the development of internettechnology in the new era. University students, as the leading group who are chasing thefashion, pay close attention to cyber language and have fresh understandings about theconnotation, application and judgment towards cyber language. Investigation shows that fewprevious studies have conducted systematic exploration into the linguistic identity ofuniversity students towards cyber language, priorities have been given to the definition,typological classification, features, and function of cyber language. This study employeddocumentary method, theoretic analysis method, and questionnaire survey for data collectionand analysis, and for theory building as well, thus to probe the linguistic identity status ofuniversity students towards cyber language, try to formulate the mechanism of linguisticidentity adopted by university students. Meanwhile, the impact of cyber language on thesocialization of university students was also investigated.The result showed that the essence of linguistic identity is a process of involvingperception, judgment, acceptance and identification. To formulate the mechanism oflinguistic identity, three aspects should be taken into consideration, namely the lingualfeatures of the university students as a whole, the characteristics of cyber language and thefeatures of the living environment of university students. Only when the relation among thethree could be dealt properly, would a correct linguistic identity be achieved. Cyber languagehas both negative and positive influence on the socialization of university students. Thepositive influence of cyber language could be demonstrated by the fact that it could promotethe personality refinement of university students and facilitate the command of socialknowledge. The negative influence on university students is that it could lead to the alienationof university students from the traditional culture, thus to the discontinuity of theintergenerational transmission of social and cultural traditions, thus lead to the shaping ofunconventional even eccentric personality. This negative influence would be detrimental tothe internalization of social norms and ethics and the development of correct valueconceptions. The study showed that the negative influence of cyber language on universitystudents were not so detrimental as to harm the socialization process of the group as a whole,but still need attention and prevention. Therefore, in order to achieve the smooth socialization of university students, it is quite necessary to normalize and guide the use and spread of cyberlanguage. This needs the co-coordinated effort of school, society and the student himself.