During the presentation, the researcher will first review the categorization of English loanwords and present how English words are integrated into Chinese in Computer Mediated Communication by showing the examples. Then, the researcher will discuss the amount of borrowing in different fields to reveal social factors that influenced language use.
As English continues to spread its influence across the globe, it is also undergoing linguistic and cultural nativization in various countries and regions (Kachru, 1981). Meanwhile, such nativization impacts the local language. This is especially the case in China, where English – the Roman alphabets – has become an integral part of everyday online and text-based communication. Guo (2002) labeled the borrowing of Roman alphabets into Chinese as graphic loans, in which, "English words" were a subcategory. So far, the integration of "English words" into Chinese in Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) environments in China has received little sustained attention. And the use of "English words" in Chinese hasn't been fully investigated from the perspective of World Englishes. Therefore, the researcher conducted an exploratory study to answer the following questions: are "English words" commonly used by Chinese Internet users nowadays? How "English words" are semantically and syntactically integrated into Chinese? The researcher collected the data from three hundred answers from a popular question-answer Chinese website, Zhihu. The topics were in six fields: entertainment, sports, politics, current events, technology, and economy. The results showed that most "English words" were univocal while being applied in Chinese, and their syntactic function fully obeyed the Chinese language system. This research inspires the audience to further investigate how "English words" influence the Chinese language system in different registers. References Kachru, B. (1981). The pragmatics of non-native varieties of English. In Smith, L. (Ed), English for Cross-cultural Communication (pp. 15 – 39). New York: St. Martin's Press. Guo, H. (2002). A morphological approach to the impact of English loan words on Chinese word formation. Journal of SJTU, 4(10), 104 – 108.
