Juvenile Netspeak and subgenre classification issues in Italian blogs

Blogs, like other kinds of electronic communication, are often cited as having distinctive genre features, including linguistic ones. This study examines a random collection of posts taken from Italian online personal journals, with the aim of confirming the claim that such texts are written mainly in juvenile ‘Netspeak’. The results of comparing the texts against a list of features reveal that only 10% of personal journal posts include even a single occurrence of the most marked ‘Netspeak’ features. On the other hand, such features do seem to occur in personal journals only, while a control corpus of thematic posts did not include any occurrence of them.