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Chinese university students’ translanguaging hybrids on WeChat

Creativity nurtured language play in the context of a Chinese digital social media

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2022

Fang Qi  and
Junlong Li
Fang Qi*
Affiliation:
Shenzhen University, The School of Foreign Languages, Dept of English, Shenzhen, China
Junlong Li
Affiliation:
Shenzhen University, The School of Foreign Languages, Dept of English, Shenzhen, China
*
Email: georgeiqi@szu.edu.cn
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Extract

The popularity of the online social media in China promotes a dynamic digital drive for both global and glocalised communications, facilitating the emergence of more connected intercultural language practices unimaginable in the past. Social media also creates a vast community where pervasive translanguaging practices take place daily. Translanguaging hybrids coined by Chinese university students on WeChat are exactly a case in point. WeChat is a free platform launched in 2011 by Tencent. Well established in China and the world over, Tencent provides multimodal instant messaging services. Open to world cultures, these students show ingenuity in translanguaging linguistic play in their daily text messages; meanwhile, their creative coinage of translanguaging hybrids influences the entire WeChat community. Written language in the WeChat community, often amounting to a new form of speech, deserves serious scholarly inquiry.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Today , Volume 39 , Issue 4 , December 2023 , pp. 297 - 306
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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