ABSTRACT
What kind of linguistic entity is email? Use of networked computing to exchange written messages has been with us for three decades (Abbate 1999: 106-11), but proliferation of email within the broader public arena only seriously began in the 1990s. Given email’s stagewise evolution, it is hardly surprising that commonplace depictions of the linguistic character of email (such as ‘everyone uses emoticons’ or ‘email inevitably leads to flaming’) are not universally applicable to messages written today by grandmothers, job applicants, customers ordering on-line, or teenage girls chatting through instant messaging (see Crystal 2001).
