“Synchronous online chat” English: Computer-mediated communication

This study aims to investigate the linguistic features of e-English, relying on a large corpus of authentic IRC and Yahoo Messenger chat sessions (both public and private). The study concludes that economy is a salient attribute of e-English. Among the other major linguistic features that were detected in this study are: sentences are characteristically short and simple, many words are distorted and truncated in familiar and unfamiliar ways, abbreviations and acronyms are widespread, and taboo words very likely to occur in most chat sessions (especially in public ones). One more major finding is that e-English can be viewed as unclassifiable as either written or spoken language despite the written medium wherein it occurs.