网络用语在玷污汉语纯洁性吗？

发表时删节了一部分，下面是原文……

China came rather late to the feast of World Wide Web. It was not until 1994 that a tiny fraction of Chinese people began to gain access to the online world. But things took off in lightning speed and started to grow exponentially. In 1998, China’s Internet population had just surpassed 1 million, now that number is north of 800 million.

The cyber landscape in China is not, as some outsiders believed it to be, a neatly filtered sterile environment. It is exactly the opposite: with countless websites, BBS forums, chatrooms, messaging apps, social networking services, streaming platforms, and news aggregators, China’s Internet scene is quite a ruckus. People from all walks of life share their stories, show off their talents, express their views, flaunt their wealth, and virtually argue about everything online. Such dynamism has given birth to an incredibly wide array of internet slang terms.

Combing through those buzzwords and catchphrases, it almost feels like reliving the entire history of Internet in China. In a society where memes with “electronic patinas” have become coveted artifacts, it is natural that many Internet users now see the late 1990s as the age of antiquity. Some of wildly popular terms back then, such as “GG”, “MM” (appellations for young men and women), “dinosaur” (ugly girl), and “big prawn” (white knight) have become so grossly outdated that no self-respecting netizen is willing to use them today, except perhaps for the purposes of mockery.

By the early 2000s, in order to boost communication efficiency and to tone down offensiveness, Internet’s early adopters in China have resorted to pinyin initialism and onomatopoeic numerals to make up new words. While terms like “748” (go to hell) and “TG” (both a logogram representing the hammer and sickle, and a half-joking half-loving nick for the CPC, literally meaning the hick party) could appear illegible to the untrained eye, they have become widely recognized and used.

Due to the fact that Chinese tech companies at that time were far behind their western counterparts, western software products occupied significant market share and convey certain prestige to their users. As a result, loanwords from English Netspeak, such as “LOL” (laugh out loud), “BRB” (be right back), and “TTYL” (talk to you later) entered the lexicon of Chinese Internet users, especially the urban working class. But not for long. As Chinese Internet users gradually turned away from ICQ, MSN Messenger, MySpace and Facebook for various reasons including government bans, and subsequently turned to Chinese digital service providers, this foreign element was largely uprooted and displaced. Nowadays people who type “LOL” for laughter would have trouble getting their message across, because for most Chinese netizens it means “League of Legends”, an online game far better known than the English acronym. More interestingly, young Chinese netizens thought “hahaha” was so passé that they decided to invent something new to express their joyous bodily reaction. And there it goes, “233”, the 233rd emoji in the database of a popular BBS forum is a cat dying of laughter. One can add infinite number of 3s to denote increasing intensity.

Year 2009 marked an important shift in Chinese Internet slang. Prior to that, new words were used within the confines of specific online community. Suddenly, a random gamer’s thread that reads “Jia Junpeng, your mom wants you home for dinner” went viral and people for the first time started consciously mimicking semantic patterns to mass-produce wordplays. After that event, Internet speech began to attract unprecedented attention and publicity from mass media, whose coverage reinforced the influence of Internet speech across the society. The public sphere can now be easily triggered to become a carnival ground for new slang terms. For example, this summer saw Kris Wu, the pop idol-turned-rapper judge of reality show “The Rap of China” trying to popularize “skr”- a slang term originally used by American rappers to brag about how fast their luxury cars could go- to the extent that it can refer to anything that is smooth, slick, or satisfactory. But Chinese netizens did not buy it; they tweaked its pronunciation playfully to create pidgin phrases in which skr could replace “is a” or denote annoyance. They only use the “slick” meaning promoted by Wu sarcastically to poke fun at pretense.

The past couple of years saw the massive rise of ACG (anime, comic, and games) subculture in China. Tech companies are quick to supply copious amounts of digital products for young Chinese Internet users to consume. During that process, ACG communities have begun transcending the relatively confined and exclusive nature of similar subcultures originated in Japan. They are moving into the mainstream blurring the line between real life and “Nijigen”, or two-dimensional space. For instance, “danmu” (from Japanese danmaku, barrage of real-time comments) has almost become a must-have feature for digital content and service providers. After realizing the importance of staying close and relevant to Internet-savvy Millennials, even state media and government authorities have begun embracing the trend.

Yet still, in the eyes of many august cultural gatekeepers in China, netspeak is raping the language, thereby vandalizing a civilizational heritage that every Chinese takes great pride in. To them, Internet slang is some kind of shrinktalk dumbed down for semi-literates; and such profanity-laden gibberish will mislead our younger generation.

But their fear and antagonism are misplaced. In fairness to them, there are some obnoxiously obscene expressions that ought to be struck out of the Internet vernacular. One typical example is “zuodi pailuan” (ovulation on the spot)- a graphic description of a woman’s state of being sexually attracted to a man. It first gained traction in some celebrity fan groups, but after being criticized, rightly, by the mainstream media, it is barely used anymore.

The Chinese language is not a piece of linguistic relic that should or would stay untouched, unchanged, untainted throughout history. As a pragmatic tool that helps us access, digest, organize, and exchange information and knowledge, languages are never static but always messy, constantly evolving to suit the needs of their speakers.

Historically in the West, with the advent of revolutionary communication technologies such as the printing press, telegraph, radio and TV, the corpus of publicly available information widened dramatically in short spans of time. People would have to resort to new words, phrases, and symbols- often against the will of authorities- to convey their ideas. Not surprisingly, scares accompanied the introduction of all those technologies; the church had even accused printing to be the Devil’s work because it would put falsehood into people’s minds. We now know they were mistaken; people did what they had to do in the face of new realities. They reconcile with and communicate over them.

The Chinese experience is similar. We have gone through rounds of social movement and simplification effort to remove scholastic barriers of the language in order to increase literacy and efficiency. This is exactly what Internet slang is doing: helping us convey, in the shortest form possible, the most nuanced contextual meanings while at the same time boosting the society’s overall Internet literacy. While most Internet slang terms have fleeting lifespan, some words do stick around after all. They are just too vivid, colorful, authentic, and delightful to be dismissed as subpar scribbles or plain errors. If it is really that important holding on to the pristine beauty of the Chinese language, why don’t we just go back to oracle bone scripts?

Natural selection is the main mechanism by which Internet slang evolves in China, although other factors such as government’s regulatory effort also play a role. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, a great many of politically motivated slurs were cleansed off the Net, sparking debates over the extent of freedom in online expression. But government control is not the sole factor contributing to the trend of political desensitization of Chinese Internet slang in recent years. Born into prosperity and grown up proud, China’s new generation of netizens are less keen than the previous generations to embrace Western products and values. After seeing the sorry state of Arab Spring countries and those that had gone through color revolutions, the nationalistic and patriotic young netizens have been visibly confronting the older, more established and liberal-minded opinion leaders whom were the major proponents of slang terms that were deemed politically sensitive by authorities. To the same speech moderators, the new wave of Internet slang would look mostly harmless.

Today, China’s early adopters of the Internet are mostly in their prime, but they are feeling anxious- and I as a Millennial journalist share their anxiety- about keeping up with all the buzzwords and catchphrases and trying to incorporate some of them into their daily speeches and writings so as to avoid being lumped into an ageing cyber-population that is dyslexic and outdated. Can we stay young and fresh perpetually? Maybe not, but the Chinese language, as a living and breathing creature, can constantly renew itself. And it is those who want to preserve it in a vacuum by refusing changes are slowly killing it.