But very unfortunately it happened. Accompanied by laptops and now smart phones, the young generation started to dominate the internet since late 1990s. After suffering from the rigid and tedious Chinese taught in school for years, they created their own Mandarin, which was spread through internet immediately. This Mandarin, known as "internet Mandarin", is modern, concise but difficult to understand. For example, they use "thunder" to describe shocking stuffs, like "I'm thundered", "the entire event is thundering", etc. Another example is "Meng", whose original meaning is "sprout", now importing a new meaning from Japan which refers specifically to lovely young people or animals. If you're not closely connected to internet or this generation, it's easy to get confused when reading articles written by these "New-new People", or in their language, "Chao People."
A language keeps its vitality by absorbing new terms and expressions to keep up with the changes of the times. When bamboos and bronze were expensive, and carving technology was pre-historic, people used very concise terms to record stories. Their main objectives were to record the key issues without wasting precious bamboos or metals. That's why stories in "The Bamboo Annals" are so dry - people at that time couldn't afford rhetoric. When education wasn't a universal good and most people couldn't read, simple languages became popular. This explains why "A Tale of Three Kingdoms", "The Journey to the West" and "All Men Are Brothers" are so different from the fourth of its kind - "Dream of Red Mansion", the only one of the "Four Great Classical Novels" in China whose story was not based on folktales and thus not adapted by street storytellers. The former three have plainer and more understandable languages. Today, people need a quicker and easier way to transmit information. More importantly, they need a different language style to identify themselves from older generations. The Internet Mandarin starts to challenge the modern Chinese in
use, and now even affects word choices in mainstream medias.
It's too early to make any judgmental comments on the new Mandarin. Some people blame it for disrupting the "real Mandarin". It is frustrating to find out I'm always out of date when away from China, and I need to check Chinese websites regularly to update my vocabulary, however I do believe this Internet Mandarin signals some positive changes in China. In 2008, internet users invented a new term "suicided" in response to an unexplained death of a whistleblower who reported local government's corruption and was claimed to "commit suicide" by the latter a few days later. But the entire issue was so against the common sense that people believed she was "suicided" by the government. Unfortunately no evidence has been found, and the murderer was not executed yet. But since then, people started to add "ed" to some verbs, expressing their discontent against the government: they are "represented" in the Congress, "becomed" rich in statistics, and "missinged" when they became dissidents. Similarly, people also added the term of "death" to other words to mock at another statement by a prison, which said one of their prisoners died of "Hide-and-Seek" - another preposterous story. "Hide-and-seek Death" soon became popular, and when other mysterious deaths in prison happened, people summarized them as "Bathing Death", "Push-ups Death". In comparison to the highly politicized Mandarin about forty years ago and gobbledygook in People's Daily, these new terms are much more lovely - even if we can't change the government now, at least we can mock at it.
I always wish I will be a cool grandma when I got old, who can talk to grandchildren in "their" languages. It's fun to learn the new changes in China through the small changes in the language. And thanks to the new tech, which again facilitates the growth of a new language.
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