Netspeak: Linguistic Properties and Aspects of Online Communication in Postponed Time

In the context of English as a global language, and Netspeak as a new electronic medium of communication, the present paper examines the linguistic properties and distinctive features of online communication in postponed time, bearing in mind that synchronicity is one of the dimensions upon which electronic communication can be categorised. This corpus-based study, for which data were collected from several Internet sites, places particular focus on the features of English used in asynchronous settings. The analysis, based on the model proposed by David Crystal (2001), portrays a number of highly distinctive features of Netspeak, proving an immense impact of thethis type of commucniation in terms of graphology (emoticons, punctuation) and the lexicon (blending, compounding), these being areas where it is relatively easy to introduce both innovation (nonce formation and other ludic Netspeak extensions) and deviation (abbreviations, acronyms). Keywords: Netspeak, Internet, asynchronus settings, distinctive linguistic features, synchronicit