A Written Corporate Discourse: A Preliminary Study
Jowati Juhary
[presented at MICOLLAC 2001 organised by Universiti Putra Malaysia, April]
This paper reports on an ethnographic study of language use in corporate communities. The research deals particularly with the corporate written discourse of a company in relation to politeness issues. Also, this study was to investigate the domain-specific use of two important Malaysian languages, Bahasa Malaysia and English, in a multinational company. Accordingly, the methodology used focused on the analysis of sample written discourse using the Ethnography of Communication and Variation Analysis approaches. Findings show that there is a close relationship between education, nature of job and the language used in corporate communication. Further, since politeness is a mark of a company’s image, in the sample written discourse, politeness appears to be constantly displayed regardless of the language used. It is hoped that this study triggers some sense of awareness on the aspects of written discourse of corporate culture and more studies will be done as a result of this small insight.