Memes, Communities and Continuous Change

Chinese Internet Vernacular Explained

Nie Hua

• Publisher: Bridge 21 Publications
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781626430778
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

"Chinese Internet Vernacular, " a complex of novel language varieties associated with the Chinese internet, is usually thought to consist of an increasing host of linguistic memes currently or once virally spread. Focusing on the vernacular's most prominent character—meaning change, this book attempts to account for the different dimensions and aspects that contribute to the memes' meaning and function variations, based on the quantitative and qualitative data meticulously collected by following and recording the various memes' diffusions on Chinese social media over four years. Through the discussion of four comprehensive case studies, what we experience as noticeable meaning change throughout a viral meme's diffusion may in fact be indexical to, under different circumstances, interpersonal communicative effects, collective identities, and community affiliations, as well as larger sociocultural values and ideologies, all of which can be reflexively performed, enacted, and calibrated in social media interactions. With such efforts, this book hopes to do justice to the complexities and dynamics of the "Chinese Internet Vernacular" as a holistic sociolinguistic phenomenon.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Vignette 1

In the summer of 2015, before my fieldwork in China, I took a small break and visited my parents back home. When I told my father that I was going to interview some participants concerning their experiences with new internet buzzwords, he immediately asked, “So do you know what the latest buzzword is?” Just when I was about to give him some serious thoughts, he proclaimed, “It’s duang!”, with a hearty grin. “Seriously? How did you know it?”, I was indeed surprised by my father’s remarks, not because that I was exactly researching ‘duang’ but because my father – a middle-aged, old-fashioned bookworm – should hardly have known it!

“Why, it’s all over my Wechat friends’ updates!” he said.

Vignette 2

One day, my friend Yuxia came to me with great excitement, “Can you imagine what my mother just texted to me?” Her mother, a Chinese-Bengali woman in her seventies with only limited literacy in written Chinese, had just recently learned to type in Chinese on cellphones. “She said ‘muyou’in her message!”

“Really? Does your mother know the word ‘muyou’1 already? How did she pick it up?” I was also utterly amazed, and begged Yuxia to ask her mother for more details of use. It later turned out that when she entered the initials of meiyou (a common shortcut method in Chinese typing), the typing application on her cellphone suggested muyou as the first candidate, and so she simply opted for it. She explained, “I gathered it must be some kind of novel way of saying it.”

Moments like these are happening all the time in China. One of the ways most people experience the fast pace of the changing society, minuscule yet significant, is the language they’re supposed to use every day. It is universally acknowledged that linguistic change is in a dialectical relationship with societal change, where the two processes reflect and reinforce each other in different (either explicit or implicit) ways. For the Chinese people (and possibly people all over the globe), it has never been so explicit and certain that they’re actually and collectively experiencing it, and consciously talking about it. This grand, shared experience is without question afforded by the advancement of internet technologies, and most important of all, the popularization of social media. As the majority of the country’s population (53.2%, per CNNIC 2017) become internet users, which is still fast growing, fewer and fewer people are exempted from this language change: many of whom become active creators in this movement, and more are helplessly involved in, usually through the weird and magic thing called ‘trend’, like my father, or by means of the everyday communication technology that they can no longer live without, just like Yuxia’s mother. People don’t need to think much before realizing that such language is trendy or novel – something to be opted for whenever they have chance to.

This book is all about this ‘omnipresent’ experience, which makes up a profound part of ordinary Chinese people’s everyday language practice. For the past decade or so, this complex of language varieties has always been qualified with simplistic, and more often than not negative, features2, which consequently reduces them to the marginal phenomenon, often labeled as slangs or jargons. However, I intend to treat it as a full-fledged and intrinsic dimension of the Chinese language today, in China and beyond, which constitutes the most important sociolinguistic environment for virtually all walks of Chinese life, as my two opening vignettes suggest. That’s because ordinary users not only carry out hyper productive and dynamic activities with them, but also invest great efforts and attention in the continuous development of these varieties. This complex of language varieties, given their online character, is obviously literate/visual and multimodal, challenging some previous understandings and analytical frameworks focused on ‘language as primarily a spoken phenomenon’ which leads to the dominant view of interaction only as a spoken phenomenon as well. When we consider the online varieties of language, those views are no longer valid; we therefore need more complex forms of analysis. This book, I propose such a form of analysis, one that approaches these new online language varieties from multiple dimensions: I will examine their linguistic features, strictly speaking, but also the socio-cultural dimensions and the ways in which these varieties assist people in what Garfinkel (1967: vii) calls the “the organized activities of everyday life.” It is the combination of these dimensions that gives us access to what Garfinkel saw as social reality: the inextricable and undeniable presence of these varieties in the sociolinguistic universe of Chinese people.

This choice for multi-dimensional analysis means that I will take the reader on a journey in which we start from language as a linguistic system to language as a sociolinguistic system, something Hymes (1974; 1996) always considered to be the essence of the study of language in society. The varieties that I will examine bear challenging linguistic features, forcing us to reflect on themes such as language change. Simultaneously, they cannot be comprehensively understood without understanding their social and cultural embeddedness, and their interactional deployment. Even more, defining the very object of my study requires a combination of all these dimensions, and in what follows I will attempt to elucidate this. Here is how I outline the object of my study.

1.1 Chinese internet vernacular

Since the initial popularization of the internet in China in mid-1990s (Hu et al. 2014), the language varieties associated with this new technology have stood out with its distinctive characteristics. Unlike the long-lasting contentions as to their denomination in the English-language context, in Chinese, a rather uncontroversial and explicit term is assigned to such varieties – Wangluo Yuyan (lit. ‘internet language’). While many Chinese language scholars have subscribed to this term (e.g. ‘CIL’ in Gao 2012), I propose to call them ‘Chinese Internet Vernacular’ instead (henceforth CIV throughout the book), chiefly for the following three reasons (which will be discussed in Chapter 6): 1) they always assume an apparent opposition to the national standard language (in the internet context, the standard written form); 2) their ‘authentic’ users are by default a sub-stratum (or sub-strata) of the entire internet population (usership) in China; and 3) they constantly evade codification – i.e., there isn’t a ‘standard’ variety and it may have various ‘accents’, ‘dialects’, ‘registers’, etc.

Over more than two decades, this complex of vernacular has notably developed and changed, in accordance with the growth of the very population that count as ‘internet users’ – or more often ‘netizens’ in the Chinese context. Most apparently, the major users have expanded from the tight cohort of technological elites and academics to the majority of the entire population, and so has CIV – no longer confined to a small group of people or certain domains of use. For ordinary Chinese people, especially urban dwellers (72.6% of all netizens are urban residents, per CNNIC 2017), CIV becomes an inseparable part of their everyday language resources.

This noticeable development accelerated around 2008, when that extremely eventful year spawned numerous novel words and expressions that got spread online and quickly picked up by keen netizens. These spreadable items can also be regarded as textual memes that transmit from user to user in a rapidly contagious way. Consequently, Baidu.com, the largest search engine and web services provider in China, began to publish its annual ranking on the popular phrases and buzzwords of the previous year (Figure 1.1). From then on, people started to have a clearer grasp of the notion ‘CIV’ as a collection of textual memes, and CIV has arguably become an integral part of the contemporary Chinese social life ever since.

The significance of CIV’s increase and expansion in 2008 can also be corroborated with the attention from both the authorities and the academia, with new governmental reports on CIV released (e.g. LSC Team 2009) and the number of academic papers nearly doubled from the previous year (Hu et al. 2014).

Translation: Top 10 popular phrases3

RankKeywords

1 very erotic very violent

2 don’t act like cnn

3 buying soy sauce

4 hands-on-waist muscle

5 very stupid very naïve

6 Pig Strong

7 three push-ups

8 very good very powerful

9 shanzhai (counterfeit goods)

10 Zhenglong photographs the tiger

* Based on the Baidu search logs in 2008

Figure 1.1 Baidu Annual Ranking 20084

As an ordinary internet user with a long experience with CIV, I began to consciously collect the words and phrases that had become popular even before I started this project. Such textual memes impress me more than merely spreadable items online: they have naturally incorporated the various essential characteristics of the Internet Age and seeped seamlessly into our social life. In what follows, I will elaborate on each of these popular evaluations, based on both folk accounts and academic studies, which in fact serve as the starting points of my series of inquiries.

Interactive

What distinguishes the popular words and phrases of CIV from previous (pre-digital) trends and buzzes may be the extensive participation of ordinary users, which is mostly afforded by the Web 2.0 technology that enables user-generated content and facilitates interaction. What’s more, with the advent and rapid popularization of social media sites and applications in China, just around the year 2008 (CNNIC 2009), internet users got increasingly connected, and user-interactivity further encouraged. All of this has important bearings on the words and phrases netizens create and spread.

The outburst of CIV in 2008 has everything to do with the enhanced social net-working functionality and user-interactivity. As retrieved by Wu (2009), most of the buzzwords in 2008 originated from sensational news that became hot topics and targets of heated discussion on some major news platforms with interactive functions, such as NetEase News. NetEase News is most noted, and self-celebrated, for its gailou (lit. ‘floor-building’) feature as a crucial comment function, where a user’s comment (or, a new floor) builds onto (instead of ‘following below’ as do most forum discussion threads) the previous user’s comment (an old floor)5. The more comments are built on one another, in other words the more floors are stacked, the more grandiose the ‘comments tower’ is. In this way, the news was interactively and collectively processed by the users – evaluated, criticized, ridiculed, parodied, transformed, etc., the outcome of which is usually a catchy phrase that has great potential to spread much wider. No wonder that by the end of 2008, NetEase proudly staged a tribute to the impressive comments and all its users, titled ‘No real news without comments: redefining the power of netizens’6, to celebrate the users’ authenticity, collective wisdom, great abilities of wittiness and humor, as well as their anxious concern with social issues.

Although NetEase was later overshadowed by other social media sites with more functions and attractions, its legacies in terms of interactive creativity, such as the emphasis on the uniformity and coherence between the wordplays, which the users call baochi duixing (‘keeping the shape of the team’) – a normative order with persistent regimenting powers – have also been maintained as crucial mechanisms for users’ interaction and CIV innovations in newer environments. One of such sites that dwindle NetEase is Baidu Tieba (lit. ‘Baidu Posts Bar’), the largest online communication platform in China, which boasts millions of interest-based forums for users to interact in. This enhanced interactivity of Baidu Tieba has contributed to the majority of CIV innovations in the years that followed (Yu 2014), among which the most well-known phrase is perhaps diaosi (‘loser’) (Yang et al. 2015; Du 2016).

The launch of Sina Weibo (lit. ‘microblog’) in late 2009, an online news and social networking site, which is usually compared as Twitter’s counterpart in China, further facilitated and enriched the interactions among internet users. By January 2017, Sina Weibo’s active users amounted to 297 million7, making it the largest public social media platform in China (cf. Twitter: 317 million users). As many researchers have argued (e.g. Gao et al. 2012), Weibo incorporates the undirected broadcasting function as in Twitter as well as the directed narrowcasting function (between mutually subscribed users) as in Facebook plus personalized profile, wall and timeline, making it especially suitable for transmitting information while forming weak-tie relationships among users. Moreover, its ‘comment’ function (which still keeps evolving currently), apart from ‘mention’ and ‘forward’, is the most crucial feature that constitutes the major part of the users’ participation and interaction (Wang et al. 2016), arguably maintaining the ‘glorious traditions’ as demonstrated in NetEase comments. In recent years, Sina Weibo has become the most important source of CIV innovations and the major channel for their propagation.

There are, of course, other social media applications, which also play an important role in the practice and transmission of CIV, such as Tencent QQ (an instant-messaging client), Tencent Qzone (a blog-hosting and social-networking website), Wechat (an instant-messaging and social-networking mobile application), etc. As these applications are mostly private and only accessible between mutually approved users, who probably know each other in person, interactivity is supposed to be higher than on the public ones, such as Weibo. However, without the ‘open space’, users with these private applications behave more like ‘end-consumers’ of CIV, and less as participatory innovators than do Weibo users.

It is this interactive environment and form of practice that gives rise to CIV innovations. Any CIV words or phrases, from birth, are therefore imbued with this emblematic ‘social media character’ in the first place.

Changing

The prevalence of CIV in Chinese social life also attracts increasing observations and investigations – as even a quick glance at the mushrooming academic literature on the subject matter testifies. For many who are interested in the linguistic aspects, the most apparent characteristic of CIV is change (among the myriad studies, e.g. Xin 2010, also see Chapter 3 for a fuller review), a recurrent theme in the Chinese scholarship, as well as an impression shared by common netizens. However, change, or ‘changingness’ in a more processual sense, resides in multiple dimensions of CIV.

First off, the discourse journey of each CIV word or phrase has been more or less transformational, as each item has observably undergone changes of various sorts throughout its spread. This dynamic process can also be, perhaps for the first time in history, witnessed by users through online participation, recorded possibly in every detail, archived into databases, and retrieved at any later point. Interestingly, an innovated CIV neologisms usually manages to keep its ‘linguistic’ form8 throughout its usually short-lived journey, largely thanks to the emerging normative codes of conduct on those most interactive platforms (such as NetEase), which may help maintain their high degree of formal uniformity, congruence, and recognizability. But on the other hand, the crowdsourced nature, egalitarian spirit, as well as the ‘word-of-mouth’ form of spread – features that are usually generalized as ‘viral diffusion’ (see Shifman 2014) – create entirely new conditions and contexts for the language use, inevitably affects the fundamental ways of how language is (collectively) mediated, and ultimately changes the way meaning is transmitted and constructed. In other words, any CIV innovation is bound for fundamental variation and transformation in meaning immediately when it gets virally transmitted. Consequently, ‘meaning change’ has been generally maintained as the essential nature and automatic mechanis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Content
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Methodological Preliminaries
• Chapter 3 Meaning change in CIV neologisms: The case of three ‘very X very XX’ phrases
• Chapter 4 Meaning change in virality and viral diffusion as meaning- making: The case of ‘duang’
• Chapter 5 Enregisterment of an innovated phrase: Languaging and identities of Chinese fans of Thai TV .128
• Chapter 6 Chinese Internet vernacular (re)defined
• Chapter 7 Conclusion
• References
• Appendices