As the already staggering number of ‘netizens’ in China continues to grow at a tremendous rate, new netspeak dialects are emerging. These dialects are not solely related to differing age groups, as is quite often the case with new slang entering any language, but they appear to have a geographic basis as well - just like local dialects. This may not seem at all unusual on the ground, but in the global age of instant communication, virtual global meeting places, Social Networking Sites and bloggospheres, it would not have been too presumptuous to assume that netspeak would show less regional variations.

At the Sixth Annual Chinese Internet Research Conference, hosted by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre, University of Hong Kong, speakers discussed the evolution of new language on the Chinese Internet. They noted regional variations of netspeak between Taiwan and Hong Kong and Mainland China. Language also varies between different online communities such as gay and straight communities. However, of particular interest is the development of unique internet languages in Chinese, in which Japanese characters, which resemble Chinese characters, have been adopted, but disconnected from their original meaning in Japanese.