The craftsman’s spirit referring to one who is devoted to making things with perfection, precision, concentration, patience and persistence, is listed as one of the most popular buzzwords in China in the past year.

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The product of Internet culture, online buzzwords spread fast and have a broad reach, appealing to large numbers of young people who spend much of their waking hours in cyberspace. To get a deeper understanding of online buzzwords as well as China’s efforts to refine the norms of online language, a reporter from Guangming Daily interviewed Yao Xishuang, director of the Department of Language Application and Administration under the Ministry of Education of China.

Guangming Daily: The Chinese buzzword rankings released at the turn of the year show the liveliness of network language. At the same time, cultural scholars have expressed their antipathy toward some words, considering them vulgar. What is your opinion?

Yao Xishuang: The thriving of the Internet, especially the constant advance of social media, provides the platform for the emergence and transmission of online buzzwords, some of which, being succinct and vivid, have become firmly embedded in people’s network lives while spreading offline and seeping into everyday language. This not only enriches Internet language itself but also adds more diversified linguistic forms into the Chinese language as a whole.

Definitely, with the explosion of Internet language, some words that resist standardization and are insalubrious have arisen, exerting substantial side effects on social life.

To me, online buzzwords are a double-edged sword that prompts us to take a dialectical attitude toward the phenomenon. Neither a fatal blow against buzzwords nor free a rein is advisable.
Guangming Daily: What steps have the Ministry of Education and State Language Commission taken to regulate language and word usage?

Yao Xishuang: The Ministry of Education and the State Language Commission have included language and word regulation, especially targeted at the Internet, mobile phone and new media, as a portion of their top design for the national medium-and-long term language and word reform and development. Currently, we are preparing to organize experts and relevant departments to delve into the proper way to classify online words and propose the recommended online language norms. At the same time, relevant laws are being developed to strengthen legal regulation. Since 2013, we have hosted symposiums and meetings on cyber-language and word use that were attended by the people from Internet supervision departments, language experts, network operators and teacher representatives in full preparation for cyber-language legislation.

School education is the main front for strengthening the standardization of Chinese language and words. Textbooks, curricula and classroom teaching are where the priorities of standardization are placed. The State Language Commission, together with CCTV, offered and will continue to offer Chinese language TV programs, such as the Dictation Assembly of Chinese Characters, Chinese Idiom Congress and the Chinese Poetry Conference. In addition, events to recite, write and discuss Chinese classics were organized while luminaries from the field of calligraphy were invited to campuses to deliver lectures. Meanwhile, it has been clearly stated that only language and script that are commonly used nationwide can be adopted in the National University Entrance Examination.

In addition, the State Language Commission has delegated part of the supervision and research job to Peking University and China Communication University to track the development of cyber-language and conduct specialized study on language and word use on the official websites of the government.