E-mails reveal language of love

Until now linguistic scientists have been hindered in this respect because couples generally do not allow them to listen in on pillow talk. Indeed a microphone would destroy the intimate situation of trust between them, and thereby the very thing the scientists want to analyse, said Jan Claas Freienstein of the Institute of German Philology at Muenster University.

But now love letters by e-mail have overcome this problem. Freienstein obtained them by stipulating that any students who wanted to join a seminar on this subject had to get hold of authentic, albeit "anonymised", e-mail love letters as an "entry ticket". This enabled him to obtain 100 examples. Although e-mails are written rather than spoken, they are still suitable for linguistic research because users of this new medium "write in the way they speak," said Freienstein. Unlike old-fashioned love letters, the modern electronic variety contain many literals, punctuation and spelling errors, and are sometimes grammatically incomplete. This creates a language closer to love talk. The research confirmed previous assumptions that lovers do indeed speak in private codes. They make up special names for things and events to shield themselves from the outside world.

The use of pet names is almost universal, and lovers constantly allude to joint experiences in ways that outsiders could not be able to follow. They use the Internet communication to simulate closeness otherwise only possible in one-to-one conversations. But the analysis of the e-mail exchanges also revealed that the live conversation is not dying out. In crisis situations lovers always reverted to the telephone.

(dpa)