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.You should see the reaction.Flame, flame.How about that! Win, win.[ the program has performedsuccessfully ]I deleted your message.Lose, lose! [ I m stupid ]What you do that for? Barf, barf.[ I m disgusted ]Reduplication is sometimes seen elsewhere for example, jokeytopic groups on Usenet sometimes use a triple final element, as inalt.sadistic.dentists.drill.drill.drill.But on the whole the effect haslimited Internet presence.Likewise, the use of programmingdevices that affect or replace conventional grammatical con-structions tends to be very restricted in its occurrence.Forexample, the symbol P (a notation from the programming lan-guage LISP) is sometimes added at the end of a word to turn itinto a question, usually of a yes/no type:GlobeP¼are you going to the Globe?Cognoscenti might respond with T [ true ] or NIL [ no ].Again,the effect is indicative of a restricted genre among in-groupenthusiasts rather than of a productive strategy being employedby Internet users in general.Features of this kind, along withassociated discourse features, are thus best discussed in relationto the individual Internet situation in which they occur.This chapter has discussed the main linguistic features whichpeople consider to be part of Netspeak.In some cases, the fea-tures are genuinely present, encountered on most online visits.Inothers, they are assumed to be present, though in fact the 98 language and the internetassumptions made are often wide of the mark.And in yet others,people want them to be present, on the basis of a privatebelief about the way Internet language should develop.Thelexico-graphological distinctiveness described above, along withthe general characteristics of the medium outlined in chapter 2,provide a solid basis for the impression I have of Netspeak as agenuine language variety.On the other hand, the differingexpectations, interests, and abilities of users, the rapid changes incomputer technology and availability, and the rate at whichlanguage change seems to be taking place across the Internet(much faster than at any previous time in linguistic history)means that it is difficult to be definitive about the variety scharacteristics.Doubtless some of the linguistic features descri-bed above will still be contributing to Netspeak s identity in fiftyyears time; others may not last another year.Already hackerguides talk routinely about features which were commonplace back in the mid-90s.In discussing the frequency of a Netspeakidiom with a hacker friend, I was told that its popularity was lastyear , and nobody uses it now.These are the influences whichrequire guidebooks, such as Wired style, to have frequent neweditions, if they are to reflect the real cyberworld.At the sametime, some features seem not to be changing, or are changingonly slowly.It is a complex and mixed-message scenario, whichcan really only be understood by a detailed consideration of theindividual Internet situations described in chapter 1, and to theseI now turn. 4The language of e-mailAt one level, it is extremely easy to define the linguistic identity ofe-mail as a variety of language; at another level, it is surprisinglydifficult.The easy part lies in the fixed discourse structure of themessage a structure dictated by the mailer software which hasbecome increasingly standardized over the past twenty years or so.Just in the same way as we can analyse the functionally distinctelements that constitute a newspaper article (in terms of headline,body copy, illustration, caption, etc.) or a scientific paper (interms of title, authorship, abstract, introduction, methodology,etc.), so we can see in e-mails a fixed sequence of discourse ele-ments.They will be so familiar to likely readers of this book thatthey need only the briefest of expositions.The difficult part, towhich the bulk of this chapter relates, lies in the range of opinionsabout the purpose of e-mail, as a communicative medium, andabout the kind of language which is the most appropriate andeffective to achieve that purpose.With around 80 billion e-mailsbeing sent every day (in 2005),1 a consensus seems unlikely,especially when age, sex, and cultural differences are taken intoaccount.At the same time, it ought at least to be possible toidentify what the parameters of disagreement are, to develop asense of the range of linguistic features which any characterizationof e-mail would have to include.21Estimates provided by the Radicati Group (www.radicati
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