Internet slang widening generation gap in China

by S. Pathiravitana

There are over a hundred million users of the Internet in China, second only to the leading nation in the world the USA. In China, however, there seems to be about a million problems that this electronic device has brought to this ancient country. The language that the Internet has brought is not something that the Chinese seem to relish, particularly the older and, presumably, the venerable generation as the Confucian tradition reckoned it.

But the Internet jargon, as the older people call it, is widening, not bridging, the generation gap between the young and the old.

Apparently, the younger generation has been quick to discover the Internet as a new toy, as younger generations would, to play around with and in the process invent a new and 'secretive' method of communication. I do not understand how it really happens, but the youth seem to see certain similarities with digital slang and Chinese speech. For instance, The Globe and Mail, a Canadian newspaper from where I got this story, describes this event like this: "In the new age of hip, young, Web-savvy Chinese, you don't say goodbye with an old-fashioned Chinese word. You sign off your messages with a cheery "88" - a symbol that baffles parents and horrifies conservative language guardians."

Official action against the use of Internet slang has not been slow in coming. Local authorities in several different Chinese towns have told the schools to see that students do not use this language not only at school level but at university level too. Slang has entered some billboard advertisements and the authorities have insisted that the ads should be carried only in the standard characters of the Chinese language. At the home level there is despair and lamentations. A Chinese news agency, reports The Globe and Mail, that the mother of a high-school student in Xiamen said her son was constantly using strange new words that she'd never heard before.

"She worried that her son just surfed the Internet and talked less and less to her. Even if there was a precious chance to chat, communication was more and more difficult because she hardly understood his words." Even Shanghai has drafted rules that would prohibit Internet slang from being used as "official language" in classrooms, newspapers, government departments and publications. This gives a fair indication of the extent to which Internet slang has spread and is causing anxiety among the people and the state.

'MM', 'GG' and 'JJ'

A number of terms that is causing this ho-ha have been listed.

Here are some of them: 'MM': beautiful woman, from the Chinese word 'mei', meaning beautiful. 'konglong': ugly woman, from the Chinese word 'konglong', meaning dinosaur. 'GG': brother, from the Chinese word 'gege', meaning brother. 'JJ': sister, from the Chinese word 'jiejie', meaning sister. 'TMD': curse word, from the Chinese words 'ta ma de', meaning his mother. Similar to what that Italian footballer used against Zidane at the World Cup. 'FT': to faint from surprise, from the English word faint. 'PK': an opponent, from the English words player killer. '520': I love you. The Chinese words for 520 sound like 'wo ai ni', meaning I love you. '7456': makes me angry. The Chinese words for 7456 sound like "make me angry to death." Chinese defenders of Internet slang have come to the rescue of the innovators to the surprise of outsiders like us who have been told that freedom of the press is curtailed in China. An interesting comment of a fifteen-year old high school student, Wu Dong, has been reported in the press revealing how much the West has penetrated into the cultural life of the Chinese. "How out of date you are," she says, "if you don't know how to use Net words.

It's like someone who doesn't know McDonald's and KFC." The web site of the People's Daily, the official party paper, carried a letter from an Internet user saying that a needless fuss was being made about the latest linguistic phenomenon.

"If you look carefully," he wrote, "at the Internet language that young people prefer, there's nothing unhealthy about it, it's just different from existing rules. Where's the logic in claiming that words are unhealthy just because teachers cannot understand them? Internet language does have a huge impact on the traditional language, which may frighten the scholars and professors. But the Chinese language is changing all the time.

To accept this change is to respect the rules of language development." That comment is in keeping with the latest opinion trend in Western linguistics about the inevitable changes that befall all languages.

Accept language development

A Beijing newspaper pointed out that teachers should, instead of panicking, try to understand what the new Internet slang is all about. In no way should they try to curb the enthusiasm for writing in their students. Meanwhile, The Globe and Mail's report has prompted many Canadian readers, some with some knowledge of the Chinese language, to justify the ongoing linguistic changes. I am sure, wrote one reader, that the English we speak today would be unintelligible to a medieval knight. Another Canadian reader made an issue of the interpretation of 88 as bye-bye. and went on to deliver a brief lecture on the symbolic value of numbers in Chinese belief. There, 8 is a lucky number and 88 should read not bye-bye but "rich-rich." So rich in fact that anything with an 8 number is much in demand and commands value. Rent, for instance, is greater sometimes for premises on the 8th 18th and 28th floors. And so with 6 another favoured lucky number. For, all cell phones with 6 and 8 combinations are much sought after and hence costly. In Hongkong where the belief in lucky numbers seems to be even more strong a car with a number plate carrying 888 888 went for several millions of RMB (yuans).

The odd man out is number 4, but useful as the following story tells. The Canadian reader who gives this information about lucky and unlucky numbers lived in China for sometime. "I've had the same bike for two years, simply by writing 444 on it with liquid paper! I leave it outside my friend's place when not in China, but it's still there when I come back. I had three bikes stolen in the first 3 weeks I was in China until I employed this trick." So, it's no wonder that tall buildings that have numerous floors do not have floors that are numbered 4th 14th and 24th.

While we are still on numbers, I might as well mention the case of number 9. At weddings, as this Canadian reader mentions, "For a wedding, you give 99 rmb, because the Chinese word for 9 is jiou and "jiou jiou" sounds like the Chinese word for "forever"!

The language changes we have been talking about bring to mind an experience I had when I was in the upper kindergarten in a girls' school where the teachers were all females. We were at an open-air classroom where a gaggle of teachers had gathered and were chatting gaily with my class teacher. At one stage she shyly uttered the word, OK, which was then not in fashion in our own conservative English-speaking world. Small as I was I suspected that she was shy about using it because it sounded like a dirty word. Probably OK at that time was still a slang word and my teacher's hesitation to use it may have been because it was not the right moment to use it.

That may be the problem with the older generation in China, too, faced with the Internet slang. May be the time and place is still not appropriate.