Today’s Chinese use vocabulary that are void of the language’s ancestral and intrinsic abstraction. The netizens talk like they have just graduated from a government-sponsored adult literacy night school. The phrases in high volume of circulation are deliberately unrefined. It follows the formula of saying as little as possible and understating it as much as possible but meaning as much as the listeners can conjure.

An increasing number of new English words and phrases are being coined in China. The Global Language Monitor, a San Diego-based consultancy that analyzes trends in language use worldwide, says "Chinglish" has contributed 5 to 20 percent of the words added to global English since 1994, more than any other single source.