VOICE OF NETIZENS- UNDERSTANDING CHINA IN NEW ERA

Contemporary Chinese Society , Chinese Social Media

Ever since the introduction of the world wide web in 1994, the development of the Internet in China has gathered momentum since then, and now China has topped the list of internet users with 829 million internet users as of Dec 2018(CNNIC -Feb2019) in the world and its increasing. Nowadays with free access to WiFi, Internet has become a pervasive and inseparable daily necessity in people’s lives, particularly among the youth. The ever-changing technology of the Internet reflected in the language is the emerging of myriads of neologisms relative to today’s society. With the rapid progress and easy access to social networking, online communication has become a common occurrence for Chinese netizens, hence the spring up of internet neologisms. These newly coined words adopted by netizens enter the language and provide the vocabularies suitable to the need of the user and reflects much of the innovation and individualism of the netizens themselves. These newly coined terms reflect emerging phenomena, new changes and social trend, also play an increasingly important role in giving new directions to people’s psyche. These newly coined words and expressions are formed beyond the boundaries of conventional linguistic regulation and are full of profound social and cultural connotations, which render it necessary to inquire into these terminologies because it offers an ocean of potential for understanding the rooted socio-cultural aspects of contemporary China. In this paper, I will be discussing 10 newly coined words or terminologies and their origin which came into popular use in the recent few years. The investigation will unveil much of the constant change in Chinese society and people’s “Digital Response” to that.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.