A Sociolinguistic Study Of Netspeak Based On Chinese And English Cases

As an important media in the modern society, the Internet is exerting influence on every aspect of human life. Network language, a kind of social dialect in rapid progress due to the great development of the Internet, relies on specific context and is playing an increasingly important role in language communication. The generation and evolution of web language is not only the change of language itself but also the inevitable product of social development. As a variant of new social language, web language, in essence, is the consequence of traditional language variation brought about by web culture in the information society. And the impact web language imposes on traditional language and social civilization cannot be ignored.This research mainly focuses on web language and sociolinguistics. It is designed to find out to what extent sociolinguistics has influenced the netspeak and try to explore the factors affecting the changes. In this thesis, a number of typical web vocabularies are manifested and analyzed in terms of formation ways to find out internal formation rules. Also theories about sociolinguistics are applied to explain the features of network communication. Furthermore, this paper also pays attention to the linguistic and social characteristics of web language with the purpose of proposing some valuable suggestions conducive to the development of web language.The contents of the thesis fall into six chapters. Chapter One is an introduction to the present research, generally describing the object, the background and the significance of the thesis and the methodological issues. Chapter Two displays the theoretical background—the definitions and scopes of sociolinguistics and netspeak, trying to analyze the netspeak from the perspective of sociolinguistics. Chapter Three generalizes the common word-formation ways of netspeak and makes an analysis with the use of sociolinguistics. Chapter Four makes an analysis of the social factors affecting the composition of netspeak. Chapter Five explores the features of netspeak from the angle of linguistics and sociology. Chapter Six puts forward the attitude people should adopt toward netspeak and predicts the development tendency. Chapter Seven summarizes the whole thesis and also discusses the implications of the study.The study is of some theoretical and practical contributions. Firstly, the theoretical contribution lies in interpretation of netspeak by integrating some factors of sociolinguistics. Secondly, the systemic study of netspeak makes contribution to the correct guidance and effective control over the sound development of netspeak. Thirdly, the practical value of this paper lies in that what the thesis postulates is helpful to language policy in respect of netspeak and language teaching.