Are Internet Slang Words a "Degeneration" or an "Evolution" of Language?

One Article to Understand New Sociolinguistic Observations in the Digital Age

Featured Reading Guide and Editorial Value

eISSN 2759-7199  |  Japan Bilingual Publishing Co.  《日本二语言出版社》  |  https://ojs.bilpub.com/le  |  Volume 03  |  Issue 02  |  October 2026

When you wake up in the morning, you send a friend "绝绝子" (jiujuézi, "absolutely amazing") followed by a crying-laughing emoji; during a break in a meeting, you type in a work group mixing Chinese and English, "I'll follow up on this OKR"; back home on the weekend, you unconsciously switch back to your dialect and chat casually with your grandparents. Language has never been as "shape-shifting" as it is today.

Some frown: with emoji reigning and abbreviations everywhere, are young people becoming unable to speak properly? Others applaud: this is clearly language growing new branches in digital soil. This issue of Linguistic Exploration takes readers into the language scene of the digital age—to see how online language, code-switching, dialect revival, endangered language documentation, and even AI chatbots are quietly reshaping the language in our mouths and at our fingertips. In selecting this set of articles, the journal is not merely "chasing hot topics," but answering: as language mutates at accelerating speed across the screen, where should an international linguistics journal stand?

I. The Digital Language Scene: Decomposing "Gut-Feel Phenomena" into Researchable Objects

01. Is Internet Slang Really "Harming" Chinese?

Whenever a new word goes viral, elders always worry. But linguists see it rather differently. The featured research in this issue tracks high-frequency words on social media over the past decade and finds that of the hundreds of new words born each year, only a few percent survive more than three years. "内卷" (involution) and "破防" (breaking down) survive because they precisely fill an expressive gap in extremely compact form.

Emoji are not "laziness" either, but are called by researchers "visualized function words"—on the cold medium of the screen, they restore the facial expressions, pauses, and tones of face-to-face communication. Internet language is not degeneration, but re-evolution adapted to the medium.

02. Code-Switching: "Unprofessional" or Genuinely "Flexible"?

Mixing Chinese and English, or switching from dialect to Mandarin, has long been labeled "linguistically sloppy." But the fieldwork research in this issue reaches the opposite conclusion: people who switch codes tend to be those with higher pragmatic sensitivity. Cross-border traders use dialect for casual chat, English for contracts, and Mandarin for progress updates—three systems meshing seamlessly.

Online, it is freer still: young people treat emoji, letters, and dialects as an expressive toolbox. What changes is the symbol; what stays stable is nuance and identity.

03. Dialects Making a Comeback: What Does It Say About What We Fear?

Dialects once seemed like a past tense "incorporated" by Mandarin; but in recent years they have made a counter-trend comeback. This issue's papers call it the "identity return" of language: more than 60% of surveyed young people believe "being able to speak a dialect is something to be proud of." When people are reduced to IDs online, that sentence spoken with an accent becomes the anchor for recognizing one another.

Youth subculture turns dialect into "encrypted conversation"—not rustic, but a tender way of banding together.

04. Why the Urgency in Rescuing Endangered Languages?

Of the languages existing in the world today, more than half may be endangered within this century, with one disappearing on average every two weeks. This issue's digital documentation research uses mobile phone recordings, online dictionaries, and corpora to move languages passed down by word of mouth into the digital world.

But the papers caution: recording is only the first step, and we must not turn it into a "specimen museum of languages." True rescue means keeping young people speaking.

05. Will AI Chatbots Lead People Astray?

Users of long-term AI writing assistants produce increasingly "general-to-specific-to-general" sentences, with wording that is safe yet slightly flat. The AI language style is seeping back. On the other hand, some people use AI as a practice partner, pushing themselves to speak more clearly.

The papers' judgment is restrained: tools carry no direction; what matters is whether people treat them as a crutch or a mirror.

II. Why Linguistic Exploration Selected This Article for This Issue

LE's editorial mission is clear: to understand language as "a complex dynamic system deeply rooted in human cognition, society, and culture," to encourage cross-fertilization between different branches and methodologies of linguistics, and to attend to language diversity and the documentation of endangered languages.

In the past, such digital language phenomena were often dispersed to the margins of different disciplines: sociolinguistics discussed variation but said little about AI seepage; computational linguistics discussed models but said little about pragmatic nuance; education studies discussed norms but said little about the real expressive scene of young people.

This set of articles happens to fill exactly the position where LE most needs to contribute: online variation (lexicon/pragmatics) → code-switching (social identity) → dialects and endangered languages (diversity protection) → AI discourse (cognitive and media reconstruction). It structures "everyday grumbling" into "empirical samples of language system evolution," precisely matching the journal's Aims & Scope.

III. The Value and Significance of Publishing This Article

Turning public anxiety into an academic topic. "Language degeneration theory" is an emotion; this article uses survival cycles, fieldwork data, and corpora to turn it into an observable and citable research object.

Echoing the journal's mission of "language as a dynamic system." It sides neither with the "moral guardian" nor with the "technological optimist," but records variation, explains mechanisms, and evaluates consequences—this is the neutrality and depth that LE, as an international open-access (OA) journal, should have.

Setting a benchmark for cross-disciplinary sections. A single reading guide links sociolinguistics, pragmatics, language contact, language documentation, and cognitive and AI discourse, offering future contributors a clear paradigm: starting from real data and returning to theoretical renewal.

IV. Contribution to the Journal's Development: Uniqueness, Distinctiveness, and Innovation

1. Uniqueness: Anchoring the "Digital-Age Language Scene" into the LE Brand

LE is an international journal (eISSN 2759-7199, published in Tokyo, retrievable via Crossref/OpenAlex), and this kind of composite topic—"internet language + endangered language + AI language"—is rarely consolidated systematically among similar journals. This article makes LE the preferred citation source for this topic: when discussing digital language variation in the future, one cannot avoid this issue.

2. Distinctiveness: Holding the "Language Complexity" Perspective, Taking No Side and Oversimplifying Nothing

Others either denounce internet language as dirty or lionize AI as omnipotent. LE's selection of this article reveals a distinctive stance: language is not a static norm but a dynamic system coupling cognition, society, and culture. This middle path of "neither moralizing nor showing off" is the core identity that distinguishes LE from general education journals and technology-focused AI journals.

3. Innovativeness: A Demonstration of Cross-Disciplinary Methods

The article integrates sociolinguistics (variation and identity), pragmatics (the function of emoji/function words), language documentation (digital archiving of endangered languages), and computational and cognitive studies (AI seepage, corpus tracking)—exactly the "cross-branch methodological exchange" advocated on the official website. LE thereby upgrades from a "regular linguistics paper pool" into a "frontline outpost of digital humanities."

4. Communication and Attraction of Young Readers

Internet slang, dialect memes, and AI chat are all topics for the general public. The combination of a soft-feature guide with rigorous scholarship can simultaneously attract young university linguistics teachers (seeking topics), master's and doctoral students (writing reviews), language and foreign language teachers (classroom debates), and science communication and media editors (seeking evidence). With the OA attribute multiplied by social media dissemination, visibility keeps expanding.

5. Disciplinary Institution-Building: Filling in the Skeleton of "Digital Sociolinguistics"

This article implicitly completes a thread: media variation → identity codes → diversity protection → intelligent discourse. Future researchers will follow this line to write reviews, establish curricula, and set corpus standards, with the source anchored in LE Vol. 3 No. 2.

Overview of Highlights Analysis

 

V. Conclusion: Selecting This Article Means Answering a Question

Internet slang, the dialect comeback, the archiving of endangered languages, and the seepage of AI-speak—on the surface they are noisy, but at heart they are all doing the same thing: helping us recognize one another anew in the digital age.

LE's selection of this article is not a verdict on "evolution or degeneration," but an answer: as language flows at accelerating speed across the screen, how should linguistics, as a discipline, catch hold of this change?

The answer lies in five words: variation, identity, memory, medium, and judgment. Machines can generate sentences, but what decides "why you say it this way" is still the human. And Linguistic Exploration is the academic field site that records this complexity.

This is the value of this featured reading guide, and the very reason this journal exists.

References

[1] United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). (2024). Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger.

[2] China Language Resources Protection Research Centre. (2025). Annual Report on China's Language Resources Protection Project.

[3] Special Topic Research Group. (2026). Tracking the Survival Cycle of Internet Slang in the Digital Context.

[4] Sociolinguistic Fieldwork Project Group. (2026). Code-Switching and Identity Practice in Multilingual Communities.

Journal Information

Journal Name: Linguistic Exploration (eISSN 2759-7199 (O))

Publisher: Japan Bilingual Publishing Co.  《日本二语言出版社／日本二言語出版株式会社》

Editor-in-Chief: Professor Yu Zhonggen (Beijing Language and Culture University)

Publication Cycle: A semiannual journal in both 2025 and 2026, published regularly in April and October

Positioning: Focused on linguistic theory and application, covering cross-disciplinary frontiers such as language acquisition, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, language and cognition, dialect studies, second language acquisition, discourse analysis, and language contact

This Issue's Special Topic: Volume 03 | Issue 02 | October 2026: Language Variation in the Digital Age

Indexing and Publishing: Open access (OA); indexed by Crossref, OpenAlex, and others

Website / Submissions: https://ojs.bilpub.com/le

Editorial Team: https://ojs.bilpub.com/le/about/editorialTeam

Email: contact@bilpub.com

Copyright: Submissions and reprints welcome from linguistics researchers and scholars in sociolinguistics and language technology (CC BY 4.0)