Hassiba KORICHE
Université de Sidi Bel Abbes Eldjilali Liabes
Abstract
The beginning of the 21st century is time of global transition. According to some experts, faster economic globalization is going hand in hand with the growing use of English rather than their own language. The number of foreign companies is increasing in Algeria because of the free market economy and the new economic policy of the Algerian government. The use of English in these companies is frequent and in many cases compulsory; besides, business communication is an internet based communication, E-mails have the lion share. Abbreviations, which are considered non- conventional spelling, have a space in the corpus constituted of 100 business e-mails. They are represented through acronyms, lexical reductions, and letter and number homophones. These abbreviations contribute in developing a new type of discourse.
Key words: Business Communication; e-mails; Business Discourse; Computer-Mediated- Communication (CMC).
Résumé :
Le début du 21ème siècle est une période de transition mondiale. Selon certains experts, une mondialisation économique plus rapide va de pair avec l’utilisation croissante de l’anglais plutôt que de leur propre langue. Le nombre d’entreprises étrangères augmente en Algérie à cause de l’économie de marché et de la nouvelle politique économique du gouvernement algérien. L’usage de l’anglais dans ces entreprises est fréquent et, dans de nombreux cas, obligatoire ; En outre, la communication d’entreprise est une communication basée sur Internet, les e-mails ont la part du lion. Les abréviations, qui sont considérées comme une orthographe non conventionnelle, ont un espace dans le corpus constitué de 100 courriels d’affaires. Ils sont représentés par des acronymes, des réductions lexicales et des homophones alphabétiques et numériques. Ces abréviations contribuent à développer un nouveau type de discours.
Mots-clés: Communication d’entreprise; e-mails; Discours d’affaires; Communication assistée par ordinateur (CMC).
- Introduction
Communication is a basic social process. It is essential to the growth and development of the individuals, to the formation and continued existence of groups, and to interrelations among groups. Business organizations bring individuals together to work for a common cause, form them into groups and provide formal communication links among the different groups.
The beginning of the 21st century is a time of global transition. According to some experts, faster economic globalization is going hand in hand with the growing use of English rather than their own language. The importance of English is not just, in how many people speak it, but in what is used for.
The number of foreign companies is increasing in Algeria, because of free market economy and the new economic policy of the Algerian government. The use of English in these companies is frequent and in many cases compulsory. This is the case of the shipping company concerned by this study.
There is an instant communication and interaction between all the employees in different offices all over the world. The medium used is the electronic mail and the language used to communicate is English.
The use of e-mails in business communication has emerged a new style of writing; one of the features included is abbreviation. So, to what extent is this phenomenon present?
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Language and Communication
Communication needs language and a tool to be transmitted. If we lived in the world without language, we would be limited to non-verbal communication. In fact, we live in a world full of useful tools for communication, and language is a powerful means used to express our thought and knowledge to other people. Communication always takes place in a specific context. In organizations, one looks at their various structures and cultures and by exploring impact and development of Information Technology (IT), now usually known as Information and Communication Technology (ICT). This new label reflects the convergence of computing and communications technologies as well as the way that many organizations now see the use and development of computing.
We use the term on-line communication or internet-based communication to refer to all sorts of communication that take place via the internet computer network. It is essentially a communication that people engage into, for different purposes and through different modes, either synchronically or asynchronically.
English is the primary language used in international business since when executive have no language in common; they are likely to use English. It is the leading international language and its leadership continues to grow as it is a common language used in internet based communication. This expression is used to refer to all sorts of communication that people engage into for different purposes and through different modes, either synchronous or asynchronous communication. The words that best describe these practices are Computer-Mediated-Communication, generally abridged to the acronym CMC.
CMC is part of on-line communication that takes place on a global, cooperative collection of networks. To generate a definition of CMC, we first define the constituents.
Computer, this term linked to computer mediated communication means much more than a device for calculation. It provides a platform for the operating system and software application to support network interaction.
Mediated: Mediation is the process of intervening or being a means of transfer. It refers to pitting a message into electronic pattern for transmission. A message on the internet is encoded, stored and transmitted according to the rules of the client server application and the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), and Internet Protocol (IP).
Communication refers to the linguistic features that make up the communication purse. CMC provides new dimensions for communication. It neither condemns the richness of speech and writing nor undermines their potentialities; but expands the limit of both. Moreover, CMC is not inferior to face-to-face communication because it is deprived of the paralinguistic features; on the contrary, people using CMC use the language in more creative manner.
They develop new ways to convey pleasure, surprise and anger without facial expressions. The Net users try to alleviate the communication barriers, they encounter most of the time through a variety of idiosyncratic manners. In this respect Crystals explains: “They are having to acquire the rules… of how to talk, and yet there are no rules in the sense of universally agreed modes of behavior established by generations users.”(Crystal 2001: 14-15). Thus, due to the novelty of the phenomenon, people are still getting to grip with the communicative potentials that are available.
E-mails are one of the most widely used forms of CMC. Aside from its use in direct interpersonal communication, just as letters and faxes are used, it is also used for communication among groups that share common interests or goals.
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Literature review
The language of business e-mails communication has been researched from several perspectives, providing different views on this new emerging communicative genre, Baron (1998: 136) explains this as follow: “ The medium through which a written message is conveyed can also alter the linguistic content of messages, including orthography, vocabulary choice, syntactic structure, and conventions governing semantic appropriateness. Such effects have been described for the printing press, the telegraph and most recently, the computer.”
Baron (2000) has dealt with stylistic features such as the length of messages, abbreviated and elliptical forms and informality. These features made the style of e-mail reminiscent of telegraphic language.
Abbreviations, which are considered as non-conventional spelling, are represented through lexical reductions, these embedded features such as clippings, initializes, consonant clusters as well as letter and number homophones. Moreover, they are words that are spelt in a way that they approximate their phonological value.
Letter and number homophones are shortenings using a single letter whose phonological content is equivalent to a word: |u| refers to “you”, |c| refers to the verb “see” |r| refers to the verb are, |y| to the question “why”.
On the other hand, letter homophones can stand on their own and refer to a single word, but they can also be associated with another letter homophone and substitute two words:
r u are you
Moreover, they can be combined with number homophones: b4, b stands for ‘be’ and 4 stands for ‘fore’ this result in ‘before’.
Consonant spelling is an economic means in Computer Mediated Communication; consonants usually have more semantic detail, value than vowels. In this case, words are spelt without vowels: ‘wld’ stands for the model verb “would”, ‘frm’ stands for the preposition “from”. These features are amply explained in the analysis based on 100 business e-mails.
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Method
The researcher has collected a corpus of hundred e-mails written in English by thirty-two Algerian employees at different organizational levels. The language of business e-mails has been researched from several perspectives providing different views on this emerging communication genre. As Baron (2008) states, “Like typewriters and landline phones before them, computers and mobile phones convey language. But what language itself look like?” In this study the analysis of the corpus is based on the frequency of occurrence of abbreviations taking into account Baron’s, David Crystal’s, and Gimmenez’s methodology.
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Data analysis
The company, which provides the corpus, is a global organization, not just through geographical reach, but also through the diversity of nationalities, cultures, and languages that reflect the different communities and markets. The service of this shipping company is spread over 180 countries and each country owns many agencies. Communication between these agencies is electronic and the language used is English.
In order to make communication easier, effective and rapid, a specific software system that makes intranet functions. Many tools are provided for all the employees of each agency in order to achieve their tasks. Among these tools, an electronic dictionary called “Wikipex”. consists of all the possible abbreviations that can be used by the different employees from the different countries in their business e-mails. What is the aim of such a tool?
Abbreviations are fun to use. If you use them excessively, you can easily confuse many people and sound very important at the same time. Obviously, there are many important people in “Maersk” but may be even more confused people. The purpose of this little glossary is to shed some light on the often used terms and abbreviations enabling people to speak and understand the same language
This is the introduction of the electronic dictionary provided by the company. Therefore, it is noticed that the company tries to avoid any noise in the business communication that could be caused by the use of these specific abbreviations.
The use of abbreviation is a frequent phenomenon and allowed in business e-mails. Based on the analyzed corpus, the abbreviations used by the employees of the company are divided into three main categories: acronyms, letter and number homophones and consonant spelling as it is mentioned in the following table:
Table 1: Different kinds of abbreviations
The acronyms stand for specific term relevant to the shipping company and its different activities; they also represent the documents used to provide the service as: (BL) Bill of Lading, (TD) Transport Document, (GCSS) Global Customer Service System. Among the 286 abbreviated words, acronyms appear 79 times.
Consonant spelling is the most frequent kind of abbreviations, over the 286 abbreviated words they appear124 times. Yet, letter and number homophones are repeated in use 17 times.
Besides these three categories, other kind of abbreviations is spot. We have not designed a specific category because these abbreviations are neither part of letter and number homophones nor of consonant spelling. They consist of vowels and consonants. Over the analyzed corpus, they are used 21 times.
Abbreviations are used when they are shared by members of a speech community. It is necessary to belong to the same discourse community in order to understand a message full of abbreviations. Even though the employees of this company share the same activities and the same means of communication, they could have difficulties to decode an e-mail full of abbreviations. In this case they can consult the electronic dictionary “wikipex”, write a short message via Maersk Office Communicator (MOC). It is a tool that has the same function as (MSN) but it is restricted to the company. Or even send an e-mail to ask for clarifications.
Through this analysis, one notices that the use of Mediated Computer Communication imposes a specific style of writing that will shape the characteristics of such a medium.
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Conclusion
The e-mail as a new emerging medium is a new type of discourse that is developing its own language, a language that is suitable for the immediacy of real time written communication. It is still developing its own systematic rules, principles and standards. It is more than a channel; it is a communication of its own. Some conventions are settled and agreed on among the discourse community, language works for us in new ways. Language copes with new functions; this is the case of computer-based media.
The E-mail has extended the language stylistic range in an interesting and motivating way. It is a fact and cannot be considered ephemeral. It bears gifts for linguistic investigations; it represents a new opportunity for academic study.
References
Baron, N. (1998). Letter by phone or speech by other means: The linguistic of e-mail.
Language and Communication, 18,133-170.
Baron, N. (2000) Alphabet to e-mail: How written language evolved and where it is heading.
New York. Routledge.
Biber, D. (1988). Variation in Speech and Writing. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.
Crystal, D. (2001). Language and the Internet. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.
Crystal, D. (2004). The Language Revolution.Cambridge. Polity Press.
Gimenez, J.C. (2000). Business e-mail communication. Some emerging tendencies in register.
English For Specific Purposes, 19 (3), 237-251.