Abstract
In the last few years, food blogs have increasingly grown in importance, taking the role of “virtual communities” (Blanchard 2004) in which people with common interests in food share information and recipes. Food blogs can thus be seen as places of interaction between the ‘expert’ who created the blog and ‘the non-expert’ who visits the blog and occasionally posts comments. However, this interaction is more complex than just a dual relationship between the author spreading professional knowledge and the public receiving it since visitors are often experts themselves as they include not only beginners but also experienced amateur specialists in the field of cuisine. The present study analyses the most popular food blogs in the United Kingdom in order to investigate the features that contribute to shape the discourse of these specific virtual communities, in which language seems to constantly cross the border between professional and popular communication. Through corpus-based research methods, the study will look at the lexico-grammatical aspects that characterise the language of food blogs with the aim of investigating when and to what extent the food bloggers make use of professional language in cuisine (and related terminology, in particular) and when and to what extent they employ a more popular(ised) kind of discourse. In this respect, the analysis will also include the interactions occurring between the bloggers and the other users in order to look at the ways in which the latter respond to the former’s usage of professional or popular terminology.
Highlights
In the last few years, food blogs (FBs) have increasingly grown in importance in relation to the popularity that food-related activities are enjoying in our society
The qualitative analysis examines the use of common nouns and lexical verbs to see if and when the food bloggers employ a more technical or a more general terminology, and vice versa
The corpus search for common nouns and lexical verbs showed that the food bloggers make a mixed use of both general and more specialised terms, testifying to a mixed approach of the bloggers to their blogs’ users: on the one hand they use domainspecific and specialised terminology, positioning themselves on the ‘expert’ side of the imaginary border drawn at the beginning of this study
Summary
In the last few years, food blogs (FBs) have increasingly grown in importance in relation to the popularity that food-related activities are enjoying in our society. To printed books we should add dedicated TV channels and TV shows In this context, blogs dedicated to food and drink allow anyone who is not a famous chef or expert in nutrition to be in the spotlight and contribute to the sharing of knowledge about specific food, food-related personal experiences and recipes that can be reproduced by other people even when their cooking skills are quite limited. Blogs dedicated to food and drink allow anyone who is not a famous chef or expert in nutrition to be in the spotlight and contribute to the sharing of knowledge about specific food, food-related personal experiences and recipes that can be reproduced by other people even when their cooking skills are quite limited In this regard, FBs take the role of “virtual communities” (Blanchard 2004), in which people with a common interest in food – including its preparation, processing and serving – share information, stories and, above all, recipes. In these shows the most successful food bloggers, along with the so-called ‘TV-chefs’, present their recipes and provide useful advice for a healthy diet and lifestyle through food consumption
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