Internet Meme as a Unit of Communication in Modern Chinese
At present, the Internet has become an indispensable means of communication. With the growth of its popularity and the number of users, online “languages” also began to develop and spread at an unprecedented tempo. The paper focuses on the description and analysis of internet memes as a recent but very popular unit of internet communication. The author has selected the most recent memes gaining popularity in China. The paper offers a tentative typology of internet memes in modern Chinese, explains their etymology and accounts for their popularity from the viewpoint of their form and social message. The author discusses the advantages and disadvantages of memes in terms of their influence on the Chinese language and suggests a dialectic treatment of this phenomenon.