From OMG to TMD – Internet and Pinyin Acronyms in Mandarin Chinese
Main Article Content
Abstract
This article examines the use of Pinyin acronyms on the Chinese Internet, with a focus on their use as a strategy for producing taboo language in online interaction. The popularization of the Internet and the high penetration of Internet use among young users in Mainland China have given rise to numerous new sociolinguistic phenomena regarding the official language of the country, Mandarin Chinese, among them Pinyin acronyms, which are the combination of initials of Romanized Chinese words. According to the results of a questionnaire administered in this study, young Chinese Internet users mainly attribute the invention and conventionalization of Pinyin acronyms to overcoming the limitations of Pinyin input to enhance efficiency, softening the effect of taboo language, and defying the keyword-filtering mechanism of Chinese Internet censorship during online interaction.
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Licensing and Reuse: Unless another option is selected below, reuse of the published Work will be governed by a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ ). This lets others remix, tweak, and build upon the Work non-commercially; although new works must acknowledge the original Language@Internet publication and be non-commercial, they do not have to be licensed on the same terms.