In recent years, with the development of society, social structure, interpersonal relationships, social ethics and people’s value have all undergone changes, which has, as a consequence, enriched people’s terms of address. Hypocorism is usually used to express love and endearment, and extensively used in daily communications. This paper collects and organizes different hypocoristic terms that are used in contemporary Chinese society and analyzes their scenarios and rules of use from socio linguistics’ perspective to identify people’s using preference. Based on this, it further explores how hypocorism reflect and generate social implication in the context of social and cultural constraints, moreover makes forecast about their evolution.
Finally, this paper predicts the development trend of nicknames, and believes that the referential function of Hypocorism in the future will be weaker than communication. The constraint of the choice of symmetry in the power relationship is also relatively weak. Relatives’ salutation will continue to be generalized, thus filling the lack of Chinese general names in a personalized and diversified form.