Digital age, digital English

Abstract

A response to the articles on e-mail by Li Lan and Li Yongyan in ET64 (Oct 00). This article discusses what has been happening to e-mail English and what might yet happen as a consequence to off-line English. The paper first examines the effect on the use of English in the electronic medium. It then talks about the influence of e-mail English on the off-line use of English, and closes with a description of the interface between English and Chinese in e-mails.

Li Yongyan focuses on the discursive aspect of e-mail messages in her article. She mainly talks about styles and coherence in e-mail writing. In contrast, Li Lan primarily describes the linguistic aspect of e-mail English. Her article discusses both the conversational style of, and innovations and distinctive usages in, e-mail English. Both also describe English-Chinese code-mixing in their articles, as well as the emergence of novel linguistic features in e-mail English, such as the omission of the sentence subject.