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Ms G

For a foreigner fluent in Mandarin for daily communication purposes, reading online comments made by Chinese Internet users may prove to be a whole new challenge. It is another system of words and expressions that even I sometimes find baffling.

Just like in English and I guess many other languages where young speakers like to create their own slangs and abbreviations, Mandarin is facing an influx of new expressions in recent years, mostly Internet shorthand developed to express thoughts and feelings efficiently.

There are alphabetic acronyms which simply abbreviate how Chinese characters are written in Pinyin, the romanisation of the Chinese characters based on their pronunciation. For example, yyds, yongyuan de shén, means “eternal God” and describes a person or thing that is unmatched and always the best, similar to the English expression of GOAT (Greatest of All Time). Xswl, xiào si wo le, literally means “laughing to death” and is used to respond to something funny, comparable to LOL in English.

Others are new inventions or adaptations of existing phrases. Xiao xiān ròu, literally “little fresh meat”, refers to a special type of young, cute male celebrities. Their hallmark is immaculate, fair skin and fresh complexion that even girls would be jealous of. Most of the rising male stars in China’s modern entertainment industry fits this description as dictated by the shifting male beauty standards in the country. Tu háo was special term used during China’s land reform in the 1920s to refer to feudal landlords who exploited poor labourers. As an Internet catchphrase, it describes someone enormously rich but perhaps not cultured. You can also use it if a friend of yours buys something you think is overrated or overvalued.

While all this may sound fun, formal Mandarin is feeling the chills. China has nearly one billion Internet users, over 70 percent of its population, who are bringing Internet slangs into their daily conversations. With these acronyms and set phrases, communication seems to be much more efficient because the listener can instantly grasp the underlying complex feelings of the speaker. But the overreliance on a fixed lexicon is strangling the life out of a rich language that has been in use for thousands of years.

In 2021, a Chinese newspaper conducted a survey among 2,002 respondents on their expressive abilities. 76,5 percent replied that their vocabulary was fast shrinking. On a Chinese online social platform where people can form groups based on their common interest, one called “mutual help group for people with expressive difficulties” attracted over 140 000 Internet users.

They report the common symptoms of inability to put thoughts and feelings into words other than Internet slangs. In the company of fellow young Internet users, they can be voluble; but when it is a more formal occasion or their interlocutors are not familiar with the codes, they struggle to begin a normal sentence. Even writing a status update on social media can be challenging without the help of slangs and emojis. Many say they can hardly use any four-character idioms, which are a valuable heritage in the Chinese language with deep cultural connotations, or remember any poems learned at school.

Using Internet slangs for expression is hardly a mental process. It does not involve thinking, creation, or production.

Instead, it is very mechanical, like a robot pre-programed to respond to different scenarios with a set answer.

One skips the hard work of shaping something out of the mental fog and in the process loses touch with the beauty of language and deep thinking.

This is very unfortunate for individuals and the culture as a whole

While we embrace new technology, we must also make sure our cultural roots stay strong.