BELF: Subject matter or linguistic correctness in e-mail communication
BELF: Subject matter or linguistic correctness in e-mail communication

Summary/Abstract: The English language has for a long time occupied a central position on a global scale and been used by speakers of various linguistic backgrounds for successful communication. This has especially been proven in practice by the world of business, with an overwhelmingly large number of corporations operating across state borders and linguistic and cultural barriers. With the change of field and medium, it is inevitable that the language itself is going to change and adapt to new needs and applications. Electronic communication is the main means of correspondence between such internationally operating companies, and this paper took it up to investigate how the medium influenced the language of e-mail messages between business people with different native languages. 59 e-mail messages between a company from Bosnia & Herzegovina and a company based in Romania were gathered and manually tagged for syntactic variation. To answer the question of whether BELF favoured linguistic purity over matter or vice versa, we looked into grammar, syntactic structures, vocabulary, e-mail openings, and request-making strategies. All these parameters were considered as indicators of BELF formality/informality. The conclusions reached here are generally in line with the way in which BELF was characterised by some of the most important investigators in the field. Significant variations from regular grammatical standards were displayed in the language at hand, and BELF was here marked as being semi-formal, with some aspects leaning towards informality and other towards formality. Overall, it seems that business people have no regard for linguistic purity, while they value the main point of the message, facts and numbers to a much greater extent.

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