Sexual anti-languages on social media

Abstract The past decades have witnessed a growing preoccupation with gay languages across the world. However, little attention has been devoted to gay language in the Chinese context. To address the gap, this article examined the case of gay language used on a Chinese social media. Specifically speaking, we conducted a corpus-based analysis of sexual anti-languages (SA) on Blued, by following Halliday’s concept of anti-language defined as an extreme case of social dialects and the language of an anti-society. Using a total of 1,744 text-headlines collected from Blued users’ profiles, we identified and grouped Chinese SA into six categorizations. The findings reveal that Blued abounds with SA, each of which has undergone a unique formation process. In the end, we concluded by providing several directions for future research.