The Study of Catchwords Published in YAO WEN JIAO ZI (2020-2024) from the Perspective of Sociolinguistics

Language, as an important tool for human social communication, can also record social changes and have distinctive characteristics of the times and rich sociological and linguistic values. From the perspective of sociolinguistics, this study takes the annual ten network catchwords published by YAO WEN JIAO ZI magazine from 2020 to 2024 as the research object to deeply analyze the sources, semantic connotations, language variant phenomena, and their causes of these annual hot words and to reveal the relationship between language variants and social development. It shows that the catchwords mainly come from six original fields, including news events, network lines, national terminology policy, movies and TV, games, and other sources. And there are mainly five types of language variation in these catchwords, that is, neology, borrowing, contraction, accent stylization, and code-mixing. The language variations of the annual network catchwords are mainly influenced by social culture, social psychology, and language itself. This study hopes to provide new perspectives and ideas for research and practice in related fields.