Email - SMS - MMS - Preamble

15 1 Even though Jansen's NetLingo Internet Dictionary postulates the hyphenised spelling of the word email, i.e. " e-mail " , arguing that email is short for " electronic mail " , it will be spelt without a hyphen in this volume for the simple reason that the language of CMC tends to be reduced, so hyphens do not ¿ t in the concept of shortenings. Also, it can be recognised that people tend to spell it unhyphenated when examining the corpora of this study: of the 208 instances of the lexeme email throughout the corpora, 189, i.e. 91%, are spelt without a hyphen whereas only 19 are hyphenated.