Internet Linguistics: A Linguistic Analysis of Electronic Discourse as a New Variety of Language

Abstract

The revolution in the electronic communication may give rise to new modes of communication. Electronic discourse is a new variety of language that leads to significant variations in written structure of language. Electronic discourse creates a kind of semi-speech that is between speaking and writing and it has its own features and graphology. This study attempts to present a comprehensive picture of electronic discourse as a new variety of language, its salient features. In addition, it aims to conduct linguistic analysis of the features found in the electronic discourse. The corpus of this study was 340 messages with total 4760 words. The findings indicate that only 25% of overall the corpus found to be electronic discourse. This finding come inconsistent with common notion that the students' electronic discourse is incomprehensible, extremely shortened 'code'. In addition, findings revealed that students use variety of discourse features such as shortening, clippings and contractions, unconventional spellings, word-letter replacement.