The language of chatgroups 131
260groups(referredtoasconferences)bymid-2000.^4 Thegroupson
Usenet (referred to asnewsgroups) are so multifarious that they are
organized in a hierarchy, with over 50 major domains dealing with
such topic areas as recreation, science, business, computing, and
news. The recreation domain, for example, in mid-2000 consisted
of over 300 groups devoted to such areas as comics (represented
by 9 groups), games (51 groups), pets (10 groups), and sport (19
groups), as well as more specific domains such as guns, heraldry,
juggling, and woodworking. Most of these headings contained fur-
ther groups, dealing with still more specific aspects of the topic.^5
LISTSERV®, first developed in 1986, is a software system for man-
aging electronic mailing lists (the lack of a final -ein the name
reflects the 8-character name-processing limitation of computers
at the time). It was handling over 180,000 lists by October 2000,
over 40,000 of them in the public domain.^6 At that date of enquiry,
there were no less than 162 devoted to the topic of ‘language’ and 44
to ‘linguistics’. Looking at one of these areas in further detail: LIN-
GUIST, a specialized linguistics list founded in 1990, had developed
70 conferences by late 2000.^7
Introductions, helplines, and pages of FAQs (frequently asked
questions) all stress the variety of style and tone, coverage and
treatment,whichexistsamongthesegroups.‘Itisalmostimpossible
to generalize over all Usenet sites in any non-trivial way’, observes
the writer of an introduction to that system,^8 and a WELL writer
warns newcomers to the conferences it uses to illustrate the system
not to assume that other groups will be the same: ‘each conference
has a distinct style’.^9 In the light of this diversity, and in the absence
of in-depth comparative surveys,^10 an introductory account can
do little more than illustrate the type of activity that takes place,
(^4) Further information athttp://www.well.com. Quotations below are from this site.
(^5) Further information athttp://www.faqs.org/facs/usenet.
(^6) Further information athttp://www.lsoft.com.
(^7) Further information athttp://www.linguistlist.org.
(^8) http://www.faqs.org/facs/usenet/what-is/part1, under ‘Diversity’.
(^9) http://www.well.com/aboutwell.html.
(^10) But see Yates (1996), who compared a selection of features from a corpus of conference
data with spoken and written corpora.