Carmen Frehner provides a qualitative and quantitative analysis of English, German, Swiss-German private emails, text messages and multimedia messages in order to determine how the language of electronic media has been adapted in order to make written communication more efficient and less time-consuming without diminishing its comprehensibility. Adapting Koch and Oesterreicher's model of medial and conceptual orality and literacy (1985: “Sprache der Nähe - Sprache der Distanz. Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit im Spannungsfeld von Sprachtheorie und Sprachgeschichte,” Romanistisches Jahrbuch 36. 15–43; 1994: “Schriftlichkeit und Sprache”, in Hartmut Günther and Otto Ludwig (eds.), Schrift und Schriftlichkeit: Handbücher für Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft, 1 Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 588–604), Frehner concludes that computer-mediated communication (CMC) has to be located somewhere beyond speech and writing rather than on the spoken/written continuum.
Chapters 2 and 3 introduce email and text messages, detailing their definitions, historical background, and structure. An account of the rules and conventions governing the use of these modes is followed by an investigation of the features of what she terms “Involved Written but Conceptually Oral” language that can be found in both of these modes. The features whose analysis is covered are salutation and farewell, spelling (misspellings, typos and transfer errors, the use of upper or lower cases and non-conventional spelling), punctuation, grammatical features (syntactic reductions and the use of verbs), lexical features (prefatory expressions and spoken vocabulary), and emoticons as paralinguistic modifiers. The comparison of single and linked SMS in chapter 4 shows that linked messages, which she defines as “text messages with more than 160 signs” (p. 123), contain syntactic and lexical reductions similar to those found in single text messages but are less dialogic and employ more complex sentence structure. Comparative results are summarised in chapter 5. The registers of email and text messages are then further compared to each other and to letter mail and telephone conversation (chapter 6), while a close comparison of SMS and telegrams (chapter 7) shows to what extent it is legitimate to speak of a renaissance of telegrams in the context of text messaging. In chapter 8, attention is turned to multimedia messaging. In this section, the author's focus shifts from linguistic analysis of the hybrid register to questions about the proportion of image to text and picture categories as well as MMS dialogues. In chapter 9, Frehner discusses the medium-related linguistic change and its possible implications, which leads to a very brief analysis of the use of Anglicisms in the German sample. The author shows that “new features” of electronic communication are rooted in older communicative forms and explains the process of legitimisation of such changes through online dictionaries. In her conclusions (chapter 10), she discusses the future of communication.
Even though the analysis deviates somewhat from the research questions set up in the introduction, Email – SMS – MMS unquestionably captures an interesting moment in the development of the registers of asynchronous CMC and is a rich source of linguistic information about texting and email (not so much MMS), supported by numerous quantitative representations and an abundance of examples. Nonetheless, the chapter about MMS and the section about Anglicisms would have benefited from being treated in more depth in a separate volume.
