Introduction: new technology and new registers

E-mail. Instant message. Blog. Cell phone. Text message. It is hard to believe that in the early 1980s, these words meant nothing to most people, and even in the early 1990s, many people were only beginning to be aware of them. You may use a computer and cell phone almost every day, but a few decades ago the only people to use computers were computer programmers, and phones were always connected to walls. Then, as the technology became affordable and accessible, communication via electronic means increased tremendously. In 2007, it was estimated that over 1,240,000,000 people were using the internet (www.internetworldstats.com, 2007). Even by 2000 it was estimated that over 800 million people were using e-mail (Crystal 2001). In 2006, over 18 billion text messages per month were sent in the US and 3.5 billion per month in the UK (www.cellsigns.com, 2006; Mobile Data Association, 2007). With this fast growth and wide use, anyone interested in register variation will wonder how language is used in these new registers.

In the last chapter, we described historical register change and some case studies where registers evolved gradually over time. In the present chapter, we describe case studies of registers that emerged much more suddenly, becoming established in only a few years following the growth of computers, the internet, and cell-phone technology.