| Language variation and change is the main content of historical linguistics and socio linguistics. Since19th century, researches on the reason of language variation and change based on phonetics, syntactics, word-formation, geography, climate and social factors have been gradually implemented. As a category of variation, internet language, with data muchness, form variety, creativity mightiness, localization deficiency and cycle shortness, is the best material for studying language change. From1990, internet started to popularize over western countries, so did over China in2001, and then internet language occurred under the requirement of the modern times. Current study investigating the reason of internet language variation could be divided into two categories:the first is external reason, including such elements as the development of economy, development of internet technique and popularization of computer; the second is mental reason such as imitation, efficiency, energy saving and fashion chasing, sex difference. Because of the distinctions in emergence, formation and development from different civilizations, the previous theories might not be applicable to prove origins of all internet language variations on one hand while those of them pertinent to mental elements are not systematic enough on the other.The study looks for causations of occurrence of internet language variations through the analysis on both Chinese and English internet language based on social psychology, which has a complete theoretical system and a rigorous scientific system. The study firstly classified, elaborated on, sought the similarities and differences between Chinese and English internet language; then extracted out the characteristics of all internet languages. Finally, based on the three objective mental processes of social psychology, namely, individual process, interpersonal process and group process, analysis was conducted to explore the psychological processes of creation, acceptance, abandonment and replacement of internet languages by studying the previous and present examples and the results of the original questionnaire.This study has classified the categories of Chinese and English internet language variations, and proved that social psychology is the main reason of the emergence of internet language variation. Since the emergence of internet language has been systematical explained herein, the research aims to fill the gap of that theoretical area. Furthermore, it guides people to deal with internet language properly. |
