The language of non-journalistic true crime podcasts

Abstract True crime podcasts are one of the most popular products in the landscape of media production: whether professionally produced or the fruit of amateur work, they rank highly in different charts, with a variety of topics and approaches. This article aims at starting the research on the kind of language these podcasts (might) have in common, with a particular interest in the features that might be found in so-called ‘amateur’ podcasts, which tend to have a more flexible, and colloquial, style and register. In particular, the research has focused on a sample podcast and on two representative episodes, which have been transcribed and analysed, in order to obtain an initial corpus of typical discourse markers. The focus has been specifically on pragmatic markers such as right , you know and other typical interjections of spoken interactions, which identify the register as spoken and colloquial. By using two corpus tools, the study has been able to highlight the frequency of these markers and their typical use in collocation.