Contrastive Study of "Humblebrag" Speech Acts in Chinese and English Online Social Media

Abstract

As functionally corresponding speech acts in Chinese and English online social media, Fanersai (literally "Versailles") and humblebrag both denote the ostentation of personal superiority via seemingly modest utterances. Grounded in the theoretical nexus between self-praise and Fanersai, this paper presents a systematic contrastive analysis of the two speech acts in Chinese and English digital contexts. Based on a self-compiled specialized corpus of 120 Fanersai posts collected from Chinese Sina Weibo and 120 humblebrag posts from English X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook, this study identifies substantial parallels in the thematic distribution, pragmatic features, and core pragmatic strategies of the two constructs. These commonalities stem from the shared psychological motivation of Chinese and Western young adults to pursue self-politeness and construct a positive social image in digital spaces. Meanwhile, significant divergences are observed in the deployment frequency of specific strategies, as well as culture-specific pragmatic mechanisms unique to each linguistic context. These discrepancies are closely associated with cross-cultural normative differences, divergent thinking patterns, and systemic variations between the Chinese logographic and English alphabetic writing systems. This study advances scholarly understanding of the Fanersai/humblebrag speech act in cross-cultural online social media contexts, and calls for the restrained and contextually appropriate use of Fanersai by users in Chinese digital spaces.