Abbreviations as a modern phenomenon in business jargon

English language used in a business environment, influenced by the usage of new communication technologies, but also by the growth of economization of language in general, has been changing radically. To establish a sound basis for language courses in Business English, research is needed into the lexical, syntactic and discourse characteristics of the register of English used within contemporary business jargon. The presented analysis aims to understand the abbreviation processes in current business communication to the point that can be given to the students of the Business English course in the most authentic way. Using qualitative corpus analysis, we put shortening processes in a context, i.e. contextualising the features of the abbreviation processes based on fundamental notions of extra-grammatical processes rather than presenting statistical quantitative analyses. The outcome of our research is general features, which determine abbreviatory processes occurring in business correspondence. Finally, we demonstrate specific class activities of Business English course taking into account the real characteristics of abbreviations used in business jargon.