Chaoyang Zhang
We tend to categorize people of different ages and times for convenient referencing purposes and because of our biological and social differences. Despite the differences between generations, you are not alone if you get muddled by the confusion of naming the generational cohorts.
* Baby Boomers: age between 56-74
* Gen X: age between 40-55
* Gen Y: age between 24-39
* Gen Z: age between 8-23
Among people of Gen Y and Z, there’s a popular trend to differentiate them by decadal terms such as post-eighties, post-nineties and millennials (born after 2000).
While the generation Y splitting themself into Gen Y.1 and Gen. Y.2 is mainly due to the great difference caused by having and not having income, post-nineties find themselves needing to be divided into 2 groups because of the different features that emerge from them and the different values they share. Therefore, a new term ‘post 95s’ is created, making the parameter of each cohort shrinks from 20 years (boomers) to 5 years (post 90s vs. 95s).
One needs to be educated to read and write in a language but this does seem to be the case among Chinese post 90s. Most Chinese (both educated or not) do not understand the meaning of these combinations of letters that are frequently used by post 95s in their cyber typed communications (social media moments, online forums, show comments, virtual gaming and celebrity chasing topics): ‘ssfd, ssmy, yjjc, zzr, hyh, yxh, hyq, djll, nss, cdx, bhs’. Some might have been familiarized with ‘xswl and zqsg’. According to Cedergren’s Language change and age grading chart (Cedergren, 1988), the adolescent peak indicates that non-standard features are used at their highest rates by young teenagers and may contribute to pushing change forward.
Since the universalization of the Internet and and its joint products, language change has taken a massive turn. From the beginning stage (the creation of Martian letter i.e., using ‘尔’ or ’妳 ‘instead of ‘你’ to mean ‘you’ ) to the introducing of cyber terms that went viral in real life (i.e, ‘雷人’ semiotically means ‘lightning people’. ‘lightning’ here functions as a verb and places an action on its object ‘people’ to mean shocking.
These unique forms of modifying language have been evidenced to be maintaining identity by different groups. I was once among the teens that played with language. But as I grow old, my social activities and identity have changed so that I no longer have access to the newly updated language variants and resources. It is also an evidence of a creativity-encouraging society where there is no penalty for breaking socially constructed identities.
References
Van Herk, G. (2018). What is sociolinguistics? (Second, Vol. 6). John Wiley & Sons.