Cyber Language Variation From The Memetic Perspective

As a technology breakthrough, the Internet has revolutionized our communicationmode and also raised concerns about the way in which language is being used. On thenet, the way languages are used departs from the traditional one. To be specific, aparticular social dialect—cyber language—arises with the advent of the internet.Against that background, research on cyber language comes along.However, those studies were mainly about the corpus database, simpleexplanations, and features of cyber language and rarely went further to account for themotivations behind the cyber language variation. This thesis is a tentative study thatintends to analyze the generation, transmission and development of cyber languagefrom the memetic perspective.Memetics is the theoretical and empirical science that studies the replication,spread and evolution of memes. Analogous to genetics, it is an approach toevolutionary models of cultural information transfer, a counterpart of genetics in thecultural arena. Within this theory, Meme is an information pattern, or a cognitive orbehavioral pattern held in an individual’s memory, which is capable of being copied toanother individual’s memory. According to Dawkins, memes can be defined into vocalmemes, visual memes, ideology memes and linguistic memes. Dawkins initially givesseveral examples of memes including “tunes, idea, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, andways of making pots or of building arches”(Dawkins,1989, p.192). He also regardsscientific ideas and religions, fashions in dress or diet, ceremonies, customs andtechnologies as common memes. There are also languages and customs, politicalideologies and scientific theories. All linguistic memes include slogans, sayings,metaphors, and stories, which are transmitted as unit of language that encapsulates acore idea.Consequently, meme as a unit of cultural information is of great importance in thedevelopment of human languages. Its replication and transmission provide a quick andan effective way to enrich human languages. By the same token, language meme is atransmission unit of language information that replicates and transmits by non-genetic means and therefore language develops and evolves. Cyber language, as a newlanguage variation, has a close relationship with memes. Vast and various memes ofcyber language compete for survival in their living environment in order to spreadfrom one host to another. In this process, cyber language memes are chosen byselection criteria. Some cyber language memes can survive in the competition andthen gain the opportunity to widely spread. Slowly but surely, cyber language evolvesand even departs from the conventional way.This paper presupposes that cyber language is produced by replication andtransmission and its life cycle is a matter of culture evolvement. A systematic researchof cyber language within the framework of memetics might promote ourunderstanding of language variation.