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This article is based on research on the French used in chats. It attempts to conceptualize "Chat French", taking sociolinguistic parameters (syntax and graphic phenomena) into consideration. The fact that the communities researched can literally be considered "purely linguistic", since they exist essentially through language(s), enables researchers to understand why "Chat French" cannot be reduced to a set of variables identified once and for all. It seems more appropriate to describe variations as reflections of the life of those communities. More generally, beyond correlationism and its nearly inevitable complement - free variation- we are lead to re-examine traditional, static descriptions which single out and identify elements by using a complex approach.