Emails are no longer written for informal purposes only, which is reflected
in a greater variety concerning style and register (cf. e.g. Gains 1999; Gimenez
2000, 2006). Gains, whose corpus consists of communication among native
British English speakers, rates student–tutor communication as formal. He
does not specify the forms of address, but refers to Hias informal and the
greeting Dearas an example of a more formal letter style. Likewise, Chen
(2006: 40) states that greetings like Hisignal informality, while Dear+ Title +
Surname is formal. Gimenez (2000) ranges greetings on a scale from no
salutation to Dear Sir(2000: 245), with Dear Mr+ Surname and Dear+ First
Name falling in between the two. The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary
English(2005: 978 –9) recommends using formal variants for formal emails,
viz. Dear+ Honorific/Title + Surname, or Dear Sir/Madam; it states further
that Hi(+ First Name), First Name only, and no greeting are considered
informal, while Dear+ First Name is “neutral”.
On this basis, I have established two broad categories of greetings for this
study, labelled ‘formal’ and ‘informal’. The informal category also includes
”neutral” variants as mentioned above. The group of 110 students from 34
nations showed considerable individual variation in their use of email
greetings, which are subsumed under the generalised entries presented in
Figure 1, along with percentages based on all 344 emails. The circles used to
illustrate Figures 1 and 2 are approximations only.