The Study on Language Variation of Mobile Phone Short Messages (SMS) of University Students in Wuhan District

摘要

Language variation study is the major subject in sociolinguistic discipline, since language is a living thing, it contacts with language varieties and changes. Language variation grows fast and diversely because of the popularization of internet and mobile phones. Since university students have a strong ability to create novel words and accept language variation, there is a survey on mobile phone short messages of university students'. The paper takes a sociolinguistic view and combines quantitative analysis to discuss three questions: 1. language features of SMS, such as brevity and short, having meaningful punctuation, using numbers and symbols instead of words and so forth; 2. four types of language variation in SMS and the influence of dialect; 3. some approaches of social factors in SMS as well.