E-Mails as a Mode of Communication among Jordanian University Students: A Sociolinguistic Perspective *

Electronic mediated communication is an increasingly popular form of communication among Jordanian university students. They are used for serving various communicative functions. This study was carried out with two main objectives in mind. Firstly, to determine the full extent of communication that is thereby achieved, and secondly, to see whether e-mail, as a new mode of communication, sig-nifies the emergence of a new genre of writing. The corpus for this study comprises 210 e-mail mes-sages collected from the files of 42 Jordanian university students of English. The study attempts to approach this phenomenon from a sociolinguistic point of view and hence, discusses the communica-tive functions of e-mail messages as used by a homogeneous group of students (i.e. students of Eng-lish) in terms of language mastery and socio-cultural background. The data was analyzed in light of several views and theories on written and spoken discourse communication (e.g. Hymes, 1972; Blo