A Sociolinguistic Approach To The Understanding Of WeChat Emojis In Various Contexts

The 21 st century is the age of science and technology.Big data and Internet run through every aspect of our life as well as work.The information and communication technology,which can transcend the geographical limitations,is developing rapidly,such as QQ,Facebook,We Chat,Weibo and other multimedia social software what have greatly enriched the way of communication among people.However,in the fierce competition of many social media,We Chat stands out and is deeply loved by the masses.We Chat software owns a variety of functions ranging from daily communication to We Chat business to make money.And users can send audio,images,text,documents,the information of recruitment,money transfer and so on in We Chat.At the same time,the self-interested comic makers have created lots of emojis which can transfer users’ emotions.Suddenly,it is popular all over China and even abroad which has created an era of emojis.While,an interesting and puzzling phenomenon emerges in our mind when we communicate on We Chat,that is,a single emoji can be used in multiple contexts and can convey multiple or even thousands of meanings.Meanwhile,with the change of context,the emotional attitude and pragmatic function conveyed by emojis change correspondingly.This paper firstly designs an online questionnaire to analyze the social factors influencing people’s preference for different types of emojis from the approach of sociolinguistics,such as age,gender,education and occupation.Then,the development process,the style types and the pragmatic characteristics of We Chat emojis are described.Finally,based on presenting screenshots of the real chat corpus among We Chat users,it makes use of the social factors in sociolinguistics and the theory of identity construction to analyze the social factors behind the use of different emojis when people face different chat objects and contexts,such as teachers,family members,ordinary friends,girlfriends and lovers.And how does the user’s identity change depending on the closeness of the relationship? Therefore,it will be a new topic that caters to the needs of the Times to understand the pragmatic functions behind different We Chat emojis in this study from the approach of sociolinguistics.A comprehensive interpretation of the subject ‘We Chat emojis’ in this paper will give some suggestions for readers a rational use of emojis in the future We Chat communication.