A Study Of Anti-languages In Netspeak:from The Critical Perspective

Anti-languages are the special forms of language generated by some kind of anti-society. Anti-society, as a kind of demonstration of resistance, is a conscious alternative to the mainstream society. Anti-language, as a weapon of social struggle, is a discursive practice to resist the mainstream culture and construct the social reality of anti-society. It creates and maintains social structure and social hierarchy of anti-society.Owing to its infinity and virtuality, network environment provides people with a brand-new life pattern to enjoy the profound change that Internet brings to us. Netspeak constructs its unique social structure and social system which differ from those in the mainstream society. Therefore, network contains anti-social features, and the popular internet languages play the role of anti-language in this anti-society.The research is based on typical anti-languages in netspeak which are popular among netizens. With characteristics of anti-languages, network languages construct the network reality where people find new identities to be part of it. The ideology of netizens is hidden behind the linguistic forms which are inspired by their conscious motives, such as being shy, trying to impress others, eliminating misunderstandings, and so on. Netspeak is used by netizens to construct a network reality where they can express themselves more freely and even resist the traditionally established mainstream culture. As a discursive practice, anti-languages in netspeak take advantages of the infiniteness and freedom of network environment to be a special linguistic system which is different from the traditional one.The thesis mainly adopts Fairclough’s three dimensional model in the study of anti-languages on the Internet from the aspects of text analysis, explanation and interpretation. The paper describes the linguistic forms of anti-languages in netspeak, such as homophone, abbreviation, transformation, classification, transitivity, and modality of anti-languages in netspeak respectively, interprets the process of production and consumption of the text, and explains the relationship among the texts, processes, and their social conditions, or in other terms, the relationship among texts, interactions, and contexts. The paper finds that anti-languages in netspeak typically constructs the network reality where people put themselves in different social structure and social hierarchy to adapt to new social order, discovering their ideology and how they grab new power in network environment.The contributions of the present paper to the study of anti-language are that by adopting a new critical perspective, it explains how anti-languages construct the network reality, exposes the hidden causes and effects in language, and further illustrates the relationship among anti-languages, power and ideology.