Interpreting Internet Buzzword in Social Media from the Perspective of Language Changes

This paper systematically analyzes the classification, lexical characteristics, and social interaction mechanisms of Chinese Internet buzzwords from 2020 to 2024, using the annual lists published by Yao Wen Jiao Zi as corpus and adopting a language change perspective. The buzzwords are categorized into social phenomenon, political, economy, culture and technology, and emotion and psychology categories through content analysis. The number of emotion and psychology-related buzzwords has been high in recent years, which is related to people’s increasing emphasis on inner feelings in modern society. In terms of lexical characteristics, Internet buzzwords show features such as using abbreviation, homophony, giving old words new meanings, creative expressions and new sentence patterns. These buzzwords also bring about language changes at lexical, grammatical, semantic, pragmatic, and formality levels. Internet buzzwords have a close interactive relationship with society. They are inspired by social events and reflect social issues and public opinions, but also cause debates due to grammar violations. Therefore, social media platforms should strengthen supervision to promote their standardized and beneficial development.