Language and Business Two Meeting Roads: The Case of Business E-mails as a New Emerging Discourse

Abstract

In daily life one devotes a lot of time to communicating and interacting. We can communicate in several ways as in reading, writing, gesturing, and drawing. Actually, we can distinguish two different forms of communication, and language is a powerful means to express our thought and knowledge to other people. Language serves both business and communication; therefore, persons who have strong oral and written communication skills are highly demanded. Indeed, the ability to communicate increases productivity, it allows the perception of stakeholders’ needs whatever the function is: working for an employer, investing in a company, buy or sell products; communication skills determine the success of business. E-mails which are part of computer-mediatedcommunication have brought their own emergent forms of discourse that need to be described and understood. The purpose of this study is to analyze the characteristics of e-mails used in business communication. This newly emerged medium is a new type of discourse; it is developing its own language. Electronic language is regarded as a new variety with specific features; therefore, the researcher wonders how e-mail as a new emerging communicating genre affects the choice of the language. The analysis based on the corpus which consists of 100 e-mails has revealed the use of a wide range of abbreviations and syntactic reductions. In fact, the function which the language serves is considered as a feature of variation in language use, this is the case of e-mails.