BCP Education & Psychology ERHSS 2023 Volume 9 (2023) 160 The Research on the Influence of Internet Buzzwords upon the Language Expression Habits of Chinese High School Students Yunqi Huang1, †, Jiayi Wang2, *, † and Ruilin Zhao3, † 1Japanese, Shenzhen Polytechnic, Shenzhen, 518055, People’s Republic of China 2Huijia Private School, Beijing, 102200, People’s Republic of China 3NOIC Academy, Ontario, 905-472-2002, Canada *Corresponding author: 23wangjiayi@huijia.edu.cn †These authors contributed equally Abstract. This research focus on the influence of internet buzzwords on the language expression habits of adolescents from the field of media psychology studies. With the development of social media, adolescents are increasingly exposed to the Internet, and the Internet inevitably influences adolescents. This research seeks to explore the linguistic expression habitats of adolescents in order to develop better coping strategies in the future to reduce the phenomenon of adolescent language deprivation. A questionnaire survey helped collect the data, with over 70 questionnaires from teenagers, from which the teenagers' own perceptions of Internet buzzwords and their perceived impact were analyzed. Research have found that adolescents are largely influenced by Internet buzzwords, but the influence is also divided into positive and negative effects. Some adolescents will face problems such as lack of language, but society is more tolerant of internet buzzwords, and internet buzzwords can also help adolescents make better friends and integrate into society. Keywords: Internet Buzzwords; Language; Expression Habits. 1. Introduction In the Research Report on National Internet Usage of Minors in 2020 published by China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), it is shown that the scale of underage Internet users continues to grow, and the trend of touching the Internet at a younger age is more obvious. In 2020, China's underage Internet users reach 183 million, and the Internet penetration rate is 94.9%, up 1.8% from 2019, higher than the world Internet penetration rate (70.4%). More than one-third of elementary school students start using the Internet before school age, and the trend is rising year by year, and as the digital age develops, children are getting younger and younger when they first touch the Internet. Meanwhile, the report points out that most minors have their own Internet access devices, and the proportion of underage Internet users with their own Internet access devices reached 82.9%, of which more than 60% (65.0%) have cell phones. All these have expanded the Internet environment for minors. Although the Internet will bring some benefits to adolescents, such as easier access to information, materials, etc., it also inevitably affects their values, language expression too. As adolescents are exposed to the Internet and increasingly become the main users of the Internet, the use of Internet buzzwords is becoming more and more frequent, and as an emerging language, there are uneven, wild growth and even "alienation" of Internet buzzwords, which is detrimental to the growth and education of adolescents and needs to be addressed. Yang Minggang has also said that in his survey, nearly 3/4 of the respondents said they would use Internet buzzwords Adolescents are the key stage to learn to accumulate grammatical knowledge and develop and standardize their ability to make words and sentences, but the erosion of Internet buzzwords has weakened their ability to pronounce language, store vocabulary structure and grammatical knowledge. For example, the pinyin abbreviations yyds, emo, etc., immediately attract adolescents to follow suit once the network spreads. 2019 China Youth Daily Survey Center survey of 2002 young people shows that 76.5% of respondents feel their language is getting poorer, of which 65.4% of respondents mailto:23wangjiayi@huijia.edu.cn BCP Education & Psychology ERHSS 2023 Volume 9 (2023) 161 attribute to the homogenized expressions and the universal copying of the network atmosphere. Huiqin Li has said that high school students' values and learning are affected. According to the Internet Popular Use Survey, 40.8% of elementary school students think Internet buzzwords can express emotions and evoke empathy, and 30.6% of elementary school students think Internet buzzwords are fun. Among secondary school students, 42.3% of them think Internet buzzwords can help express emotions, but only 26.5% of them think they can express the real meaning. Meanwhile, the survey on the usual use of Internet buzzwords showed that primary and secondary school students like to use Internet buzzwords on social media software such as WeChat and QQ, and the percentage of oral communication is also high. Therefore, this paper will explore the influence of Internet buzzwords on Chinese high school students' language expression skills; explore and preserve the traditional cultural language that is now available to minimize the negative impact. 2. Literary Review With the network playing an important role in adolescents’ social lives, many scholars have carried out research on Influence of Internet Buzzwords upon the Language Expression Habits of Chinese High School Students. Hu found that Internet buzzwords, which were collectively created by netizens as a "national language," are a symbol of social change, a crucial component of modern Internet media culture, and a crucial window for observing the dynamics of public thoughts and emotions as well as understanding shifts in public social opinion [1]. Some scholars introduce the another professor Wang shiyong’s words which believes that internet buzzwords are the most active language symbols with fermentation function and special meaning, which are mainly used spontaneously by netizens in the network field in a certain period, time and often have an impact on social reality [2]. Zheng Danniang also investigated and concentrated on how the emergence of internet buzzwords makes adolescents and adults, and especially that outside cyberspace, create a “discourse gap”, thus triggering an insoluble conflict between adults and adolescents [3]. And not only the scholars, but others from the perspective of sociolinguistics like Zhang Nan and Gao Xiaomei, in 2021, also claimed that internet buzzwords can be divided into three major categories: old words with new meanings, simplified harmonic words, intentional creation of new words, and other types of words [4]. Although there are few studies about how Internet Buzzwords influence those Language Expression Habits of Chinese High School Students, there are many studies on Chinglish in the Internet Buzzwords from the Perspective of Sociolinguistics. In Cui Dan’s research, he studied the main purpose of sociolinguistic is to study the relationship between people’s language and the social condition, also illustrates the Chinglish in the Internet buzzword from the perspective of sociolinguistics in his paper. The appearance of Internet buzzword is a phenomenon combined with linguistic and cultural characteristics. The generation and development of buzzword has been greatly influenced by social changes in political, economic and cultural aspects. The political element not only defines the nature of the buzzword but also renders the political characteristic to the buzzword, making it distinctive from other buzzwords [5]. And this author mentioned that as the product of the social change, the function of Internet buzzword has both sides. With the use of Internet buzzword, people’s communication efficiency can be simplified. Being one of the main users of this Internet buzzword, teenagers who prefer to chase for fashion can build their culture confidence and realize their own national identities. With these exchanges in language, Chinese and English can gain improvements so as to strengthen the communication capability. While on the other hand, the use of the Internet buzzword also has some shortcomings in the real application of language. The wide use of buzzword in Athens Journal of Philology XY 11 people’s daily life may enlarge the language gap between the younger generation and the elder one. The Internet buzzwords often gain their roots from the Internet, which is unfamiliar for the Chinese elder generation [6], and that will ultimately affect the mental or psychological growth of adolescents in their future. These examples can help us better understand the significance of this study. BCP Education & Psychology ERHSS 2023 Volume 9 (2023) 162 These studies and theories above help people understand some background information in advance. However, there still exist some research gaps. Although there are many literatures about how internet buzzwords influence adolescents studying in Chinese High School, few studies have been conducted on the significance of the Chinglish in the internet buzzwords. The development of various social media and the emergence of new buzzwords have a subtle influence on the language expression and habits of the young generation. They are more likely to accept novel ways of expression and identify with them [7]. This paper can help more people understand the meanings of internet buzzwords and communicate with them conveniently. In order to achieve the expected purposes of this study and let the significance of this study can be put into practice. This research will study the influence of using internet buzzword in daily life through questionnaire. 3. Methodology First of all, the research approach is doing a quantitative survey by distributing the questionnaires. In order to find the significant effect of internet buzzwords, data analysis is the key to quantitative research. This research is used Wenjuanxing as a platform to collect data and the period of that is two weeks. Furthermore, the questionnaire was made up of 13 multiple choices and 5 short answers. Most of the questionnaires are designed to find out whether Chinese senior middle school students know the top ten in terms of popular internet buzzwords, so as to infer how much they know about them. Also, the last few questions are asked in order to investigate the student’s opinions on the effect of internet buzzwords. The author collected 68 answers from their classmates, families and cousins who are Chinese high school students. Among these collected questionnaires, two of them were useless because all of the answers to all the multiple-choice questions is the same. 4. Results The appearance of Internet buzzword is a phenomenon combined with linguistic and cultural characteristics. The generation and development of buzzword has been greatly influenced by social changes in political, economic and cultural aspects. There are about 70 respondents taken part in this questionnaire. About 41% of them use internet buzzwords frequently, but over half of them (55%) use internet buzzwords in their daily life occasionally, not often use. The rest is about 2.86%. There is a commonality among these questions, that is, the more popular internet buzzwords are, the more likely they are to be known, which is similar as the Social Cognitive Theory. The six to twelve questions in the questionnaire are based on the popularity of internet buzzwords. The two most popular are “yyds” and “neijuan”, which contain all proportion of 70. In fact, most Internet buzzwords, including "YYDS," have not been widely known since their inception, and they may be only the product of cultural compartmentalization in the initial stage [8]. Then, the percentages of people’s knowing to “babiQ” and “emo” are the same (98.57%). The data of “zhongcao/ bacao” and “u1s1” is range from 91% to 96%. It is noteworthy that the percentages of knowing “nbcs” peaks at the lowest, almost twice as many people don’t know what it means as people know. In conclusion, one of the results is that the internet buzzwords have a positive tendency with students’ understanding. About 41% of them use internet buzzwords frequently, but over half of them (55%) use internet buzzwords in their daily life occasionally, not often use. It can be referred that most of them are busy in study, only can relax at weekends. The rest is about 2.86%, and it seems that they never mind the currently popular things. They use social medias with the formal communication. When people were asked if they thought Internet buzzwords had an impact on them, 57.14% of all people chose there are some impacts, with 30% choosing negative impacts and 27.14% choosing positive impacts. This shows that Internet buzzwords have different effects on people in different usage contexts. Surprisingly, about 42.86% of people chose no impacts. For those participants who chose positive impacts, they felt that Internet buzzwords could enrich daily communication and better establish conversation with friends. They even commented that BCP Education & Psychology ERHSS 2023 Volume 9 (2023) 163 Internet buzzwords " makes it easier to communicate by using easy words to explain words that are difficult to express in ordinary language. For those participants who chose the negative impacts, they believed that Internet buzzwords tend to cause misinformation dissemination and are detrimental to the development of Chinese characters. Most of the participants who chose the negative impacts said that the frequent use of Internet buzzwords represents the linguistic barrenness, lower vocabulary and degradation of language organization. One participant even gave a specific example, saying that Internet buzzwords have tampered with the meaning of many original words, such as 茂林修竹(Mao Lin Xiu Zhu), which originally meant tall, but nowadays, 修狗 (Xiu Gou), instead, is compared to small because of its harmonic meaning. For those participants who chose no impacts, they felt that their use of Internet buzzwords was not significant enough to cause an effect; others said they could distinguish which occasions they could and could not use and could control the words they used when speaking, and that Internet buzzwords were just a way of communication, so there was no significant effect to them. When participants were asked whether they had experienced misunderstandings caused by the use of Internet buzzwords, 90% of them said that Internet buzzwords could cause misunderstandings in their daily lives, while the remaining 10% said they did not use Internet buzzwords in their daily lives. When asked if participants had ever used Internet buzzwords in assignments and exams such as writing papers, and answering questions, 92.86% of participants said they had never used Internet buzzwords in these situations. And surprisingly, 2.86% of the participants said they had used it and had received positive feedback from their teachers. Only 1.43% of the participants indicated that they used it, and teachers gave negative feedback. When asked the suggestions on “how to use internet buzzwords properly”, more participants asked students to spread their meanings more properly and precisely, not only in writing, but also in oral speaking. 5. Discussion The result of the first one is that internet buzzwords and students’ understanding have a positive connection. First of all, this phenomenon can be explained by Social Cognitive Theory, which emphasized that the more popular internet buzzwords are, the more likely they are to be exposed. Furthermore, the number of people who know the new internet buzzwords is growing exponentially. People will constantly pass on new internet buzzwords to those around them in their daily communication. This result leads to both negative and positive effects. Although it is indeed that with the internet buzzwords, students could communicate in a more modern and fashion way, which suits with the characteristics of modern social pluralism. Also, it can save time when typing. For example, “cu” means “see you”. Moreover, using buzzwords is a splendid way to show off the personality. Yao analyzed that Internet buzzwords are constantly emerging as a result of the Internet's rapid development and are widely used in the press, the public, and on the Internet. They capture the spirit of the modern era and the significant shifts in society, culture, and way of life [9]. Yang also proposed that the efficiency of the discourse of youth ideology and political education can be increased by using the network buzzwords as a window to examine the social psychological requirements and linguistic preferences of modern youth [10]. However, internet buzzwords can sometimes cause misunderstanding and poor expression, which has a negative side to formal writing. What is worse, long-term use of network language will make students lose interest in the study of language expression. If the use of network language affects communication and leads to the downside, it will gradually lose the meaning of language. Therefore, to against the above-mentioned disadvantages, teachers and educators should not be too conniving or objecting, and applying tolerant understanding and moderate grasp to treat this problem. Furthermore, students should seek the good and avoid the bad sides, and neither refuse to use network language, nor excessive use of network language. In order to keep the good side, government and society can strengthen the construction of a standardized network language environment. BCP Education & Psychology ERHSS 2023 Volume 9 (2023) 164 The majority of participants gave answers that supported their choices when asked whether and why Internet buzzwords have an impact. Internet buzzwords do have positive effects, including facilitating daily communication, and negative effects, including lowering vocabulary. However, when a surprisingly high proportion of participants chose the answer of no effect, it is possible that the majority of adolescents are self-managed enough to use written language in formal situations and use internet buzzwords in social situations, so it does not have a significant impact on their lives. Regarding the influence of Internet buzzwords, teenagers should learn to distinguish occasions, use the right language in the right situations, and build up their vocabulary while being exposed to Internet buzzwords, so that the language is not scarce and easier to communicate. Meanwhile, 90% of the participants said that Internet buzzwords do cause misunderstanding. And the remaining 10% said they would not use Internet buzzwords. This shows that whenever people use internet buzzwords, there is a high possibility of misunderstanding. This is because there is a problem that Internet buzzwords have multiple meanings, which are different from their original meanings. Some older people do not even know or understand the meaning of some Internet buzzwords, so they may cause misunderstandings in daily communication. These misunderstandings may result in inconvenient communication and untimely communication of meanings. Some measures that can be taken to solve the problem include using specific words in specific situations and reducing the use of Internet buzzwords. Finally, when asked whether they would use Internet buzzwords in assignments such as exams, 92.86% of teenagers chose not to use them. This shows that teenagers have developed a complete language system, and their formal language expressions are not easily influenced by Internet buzzwords, and they can distinguish between using the right words at the right time. Usually, they will only use it in social situations, which will affect their verbal skills, and their written expressions will receive a small part of the impact. This actually has a positive impact because people do not suffer from a lack of vocabulary, a shortage, or a loss of culture due to the use of Internet buzzwords, but rather the two coexist. Two participants also reported positive feedback from their teachers, which shows that society is now more accepting and tolerant of Internet buzzwords. This can be found that nowadays the development of internet is faster and more convenient than the past, and everything can be found on the Internet. By contrast, few participants who spend less time on social medias, because they mainly busy with their jobs or studies and eager to do outside things. It can be discovered that how long they encounter internet buzzwords per week through the result of this questionnaire. And most of them mention that buzzwords can provide an opportunity to let them see and hear when looking up the WeChat and Weibo or even in everywhere. It can be referred that most of them are busy in study, only can relax at weekends, and the rest one seems that they never mind the currently popular things. They frequently use social medias with the formal communication. It’s clear that network buzzwords play an important role in adolescents’ social lives, even bases on Influence of Internet Buzzwords upon the Language Expression Habits of Chinese High School Students. This questionnaire brought a lot of things that can be worth investigating, but it also has some problems better to bolster it. This can be valid, because it has already studied further and further from those professional scholars and sociolinguistics. However, like this scholar think that’ the network buzzwords are the most active language symbols with fermentation function and special meaning’, which can be widely accepted by most people. What’s more, there also many studies on Chinglish in the Internet Buzzwords from the Perspective of Sociolinguistics and seems as important as above are investigated. Finally, these studies helped a lot through this progress of investigating. 6. Conclusion Overall, there are some unexpected results, but the majority of them were expected. For example, when the questions come to “the average usage time on smartphones” and “the understanding of top 10 popular internet buzzwords”, the results are matched to the conjectures. But when asking participants, the effects of using internet buzzwords, the majority of them answered that there is no BCP Education & Psychology ERHSS 2023 Volume 9 (2023) 165 effect. What is more, there are some people argued that the internet buzzwords have a negative impact on humans, especially adolescents, whose self-control is poor. The stereotype, forming from experts and bias, has been broken in this study. What is more, one of the results also find out the relationship between internet buzzwords and their popularity. The positive relationship confirmed and proofed the correctness of a basic theory--- Social Cognitive Theory, and explained it in a more life-like, more precisely and vivid way. Also, the discernment and sense of right and wrong of adolescents proofed that teenagers are mature. In conclusion, this paper is a openness discussion on the relationship between words and understanding, the impact on participants and what that phenomenon can be shown. References [1] Hu. J, Critical Discourse Analysis and Research Based on Ideological Internet Buzzwords. 2021 IEEE Asia-Pacific Conference on Image Processing, Electronics and Computers (IPEC). 2021. [2] CNNIC, The 48th Statistical Report on China’s Internet Development, China Internet Network Information Center, 2021. [3] M. G. Yang, R. C. Chen, M. Y. Gu, Investigation and analysis of college students' Internet buzzword usage behavior: A case study of some universities in Shanghai, China Advertising, 2021. [4] H. Q. Li, Research on the use of Internet buzzwords among high school students, Shandong Normal University, 2015. [5] Y. ling, Analyzing Internet Buzzwords from the Perspective of Cognition and Emotion, International Journal of English Language Studies, 2021. [6] C. Dan, X. Y. Liu. Research on Chinglish in the Internet Buzzwords from the Perspective, Athens Journal of Philology, 2021. [7] Y. Chen, How to go from popular to dissipating? The process and mechanism of the Chinese internet buzzword “YYDS”. Advances in Education, Humanities and Social Science Research, 2022. [8] Y. Hao, Study on the Formation, Characteristic and Influence of Network Buzzword “XX-Zi”. In Proceedings of 3rd International Symposium on Education, Culture and Social Sciences, 2021. [9] M. L. Yao, On the translation strategies of internet buzzwords. Overseas English, 2021. [10] Q. Yang, Y. W. Department, The discourse innovation of youth ideological and political education from the perspective of network buzzwords. Journal of Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications (Social Science Edition), 2018.