A Special Language for Business Communication: The Case of Business E- Mails used in three Different Companies

Abstract

The recent electronic device “Internet” has embraced several means of communication. In the present study, the focus is on “electronic mail” which is part of Computer Mediated Communication (CMC). The investigation considered business e-mails that are exchanged in business communication taking place in three different companies. We explored the impact of electronic medium on the language. If we consider internet as a revolution, it is extended to the language. The emergence of e-mail as an increasingly popular medium of interaction has brought its own emergent form of discourse that needs to be described, investigated, and understood as prevalent discourse form of the future. Consequently, we assumed that e-mail is not only a medium, but a new style of communication as well. Actually, the corpus based analysis revealed features that make up the pattern of business e-mail, besides the language exponents which include a wide range of abbreviations represented in letter and number homophones, acronyms, and consonant spelling. These features conveyed a novel discourse which embraces a hybrid language including speech and writing