The Study on the Definition of Language Anomie in the Digital Age

In the digital age featured by complex and chaotic language phenomena, precisely defining language anomies has become a crucial academic issue. This paper tries to analyze language anomie systematically from the perspectives of language norms and language ethics. Our discussion reveals that in the digital age, mass communities dominate discourse expression in cyberspace, language norms as “model ideology” face both theoretical and practical challenges in establishing evaluation criteria for identifying language anomies, whereas “bottom-line ideology” that adopts violations of language ethics as judgment criteria provides a viable framework. Consequently, via synthesizing traditional Chinese ethics, existing digital space (network) ethical norms in and out of China, and modern public ethics, this paper proposes a preliminary definition of language anomie in the digital age and discusses how bottom-line ideology informs language standardization and governance.