Experts debate impact of letter words on Chinese

Letter words have become ubiquitous in everyday Chinese communication. Hybrid forms such as K ge, literally "K song" for karaoke, C wei meaning "C position" or center position and P tu, literally "P picture" in reference to Photoshop editing, mix foreign letters with Chinese.

Beyond these hybrid forms, pure English-letter acronyms such as KPI for key performance indicator, CEO for chief executive officer, PPT for PowerPoint, and CT for computed tomography, have also become deeply embedded in everyday Chinese. So familiar are they to Chinese speakers that they have been seamlessly woven into both spoken and written language, serving as convenient shorthand for concepts that might otherwise require lengthy Chinese translations.

While some worry that the growing use of foreign letters may undermine the aesthetic appeal of the Chinese language, experts argue that such anxiety, though understandable, overlooks the language's remarkable capacity for absorption and reinvention.

The real problem, they say, lies not in letter words themselves, but in opaque, self-serving jargon that builds walls rather than bridges.

Zhou Chenmeng, curator of the Archives History Museum at the University of International Business and Economics, said, "The beauty of Chinese has never been about being 'pure' — it's about being 'alive.'"

She noted that what truly bothers the public is not letter words themselves, but the use of letters to put up a front, particularly when Chinese characters would be more than sufficient to convey the intended meaning.

Yang He, a lecturer in classical Chinese at the School of Liberal Arts at Renmin University of China, described public unease as a conscious defense of the subjectivity of the mother tongue — an "immune response" in the healthy development of the language.

The distinction becomes clearer when letter words are compared with internet industry jargon, such as "aligning granularity", meaning aligning minute details or standards, and "pulling through the closed loop", referring to coordinating an entire process to achieve closed-loop management. Such expressions have been widely criticized as examples of "not speaking properly".

Yang said internet jargon creates bubbles from within. "When the accurate meaning of language is blurred over time, it becomes hard to distinguish right from wrong. This is not progress, but regression," she said.

Zhou described phrases such as "aligning granularity" as a way of "building walls" by using complex terms to package simple ideas. "They dilute the precision of the original terms. Their purpose is not more precise communication, but to build industry barriers and mark in-group identity," she said. "This undoubtedly harms the precision and warmth that Chinese should have as a communication tool."

Dang Jingpeng, an associate professor at the School of Chinese Culture and Communication at Beijing International Studies University, offered an empirical perspective.

Citing a statistical study of People's Daily from 1990 to 2014, she noted that "on average, one letter word appears for every 2,372 Chinese-character words", indicating their relatively low frequency. The Modern Chinese Dictionary includes only around 200 such terms.

"A limited number of letter words will not affect the overall landscape of the Chinese language," she said.

Liu Guangting, associate dean of the School of Chinese Culture and Communication at Beijing International Studies University, described the phenomenon as a form of linguistic restructuring.

"When foreign letter fragments enter Chinese, they no longer follow the original grammatical rules but are reshaped by the Chinese system," she said. "K in K ge" can be used flexibly as a verb, while "C wei" was independently coined by Chinese speakers and is not found in English, demonstrating the language's strong capacity for localization.

Zhou described the process as "not simple borrowing, but creation" — a restructuring based on native Chinese morphosyntactic rules. "This creative transformation is not defense, but absorption," she said.

The experts also emphasized that the use of letter words should be guided by context.

Yang advocated a tiered approach to balancing timely communication with preserving the beauty of Chinese. In casual settings such as WeChat chats, abbreviations such as YYDS, short for yongyuandeshen, or "eternal god", can instantly convey emotion. Replacing them with the full Chinese expression could drain some of the fun from informal communication.

For publications and media, however, she recommended delayed adoption, standardized annotation and active demonstration, encouraging creators to use refined Chinese in place of trendy letter words.

Dang emphasized that formal public communication should adhere to the Law on the Standard Spoken and Written Chinese Language. She noted that the State Council, China's Cabinet, has published 16 batches of recommended Chinese translations covering 261 foreign terms through an interministerial joint conference mechanism.

Yang also pointed out that Buddhist, Western and Japanese vocabulary were once feared as threats to the Chinese language, yet all eventually became part of its linguistic fabric.

"What we fear has never been the influx of foreign words — it's that one day we might become too lazy to internalize them," Zhou said.

Chinese, she observed, has no obsession with turning all foreign words into pure Chinese-character terms. "It allows letter words to coexist with Chinese characters over the long term, because its robust syntactic rules are sufficient to domesticate them."

zoushuo@chinadaily.com.cn