Home and Away is an Australian soap opera
produced by the Seven Network that has been broadcast in Ireland by the national
broadcaster, Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ), since the late 1980s. Homeandawayireland.com is a blog created
in 2006 that provides an overview of the storylines and what is argued to be a
primarily ‘conversational space’ for discussing the show in a humorous way (‘About
Home and Away Ireland’, 2010: Internet).
The humour, this paper argues, is underpinned and bolstered by invoking spoken
Irish English as a humorous frame, and by indexing features of the spoken
Australian English used in the soap opera itself. In this way, spoken language
becomes the baseline for the humour, and the linguistic currency of the
community. In order to characterise the language used in the online community
of Homeandawayireland.com, a plain
text archive of posts on the blog has been created for analysis using corpus
linguistic methodologies – thus treating the archive as a corpus in and of
itself (see Sinclair, 2001). This paper will first of all compare the blog
corpus with corpora of spoken Irish English (such as the Limerick Corpus of
Irish English, and ICE-Ireland) and freely available corpora of written English
in order to investigate to what extent, and in what ways, a ‘conversational’
genre is created by the blog community. The results of these linguistic
analyses are then used to create a framework for discussing how the culturally
distinct world of the soap opera has been appropriated and reframed as
culturally local through these local linguistic resources of the blog community,
and how language data such as that represented by the blog is a valuable new
resource for investigating language use.