Language Policy In Social Media

Social media is one of the hotspots in the field of language policy in recent years.The development and popularization of Internet technology provides a broader platform for language contact in the virtual world.Language practice in social media sites,particularly,is unprecedentedly active.As an important component of the of the Internet world,China's social media has important implications for the field of language policy.This study includes four parts which are as follow:The first part: Introduction.This part describes the background and the significance of the topic,literature review,research design and research methods of this study,as well as the structure of the paper.As the expansion of the research domains,the concept of language policy has been greatly developed since the 1960 s.When exploring a wider range of domains with attention to both explicit and implicit forms of policymaking,it becomes clear that not simply government officials but also individuals can and do engage in making and modifying language policies.At the same time,the coming of the Internet era and the openness of social media sites have undoubtedly provided language policy researchers with a natural platform and rich corpus to observe.The deep interaction among the language management,language practice and language ideology in cyberspace needs to be further discussed.The second part: empirical analysis.The first section of the chapter briefly introduces three target social media sites,and the last two sections respectively discuss the language management and language ideology.The section of language management starts with policy texts from macroscopic perspective to microcosmic perspective;it compares the differences and similarities between three social media(i.e.,liba.com,kdslife,and Sina Weibo)on the synchronic aspect of language management from national level to cyber level,and analyzes the diachronic changes in language policy on a single media platform(mainly liba.com),as well as observes the feedback effect of language practice on language policy on social media sites.The section of language ideology,by analyzing the formation process and formation reasons of the discourse trajectory,observes user's language practice on different platforms under the same public event so as to compare the differences in language ideology among users of different speech communities,and explores the dynamic relationship between language management,language ideology and language practice.The third part: discussion and reflection.This part analyzes the linguistic features of the online speech communities,according to the differences through the above observations and comparisons,and explores the linguistic motivations behind the public events,as well as summarizes the characteristics of the network language itself.This part also tries to offer some advice and suggestions for the development of the online language policy,and looks into the possible future research directions.The last part: conclusion.This part summarizes the content,method and theoretical significance of this study,trying to observe and understand language life through the in-depth analysis of a typical public event.