Internet Discourses Revisited: the Language of Creepypastas

As the realm of the Internet becomes particularly favourable and stimulating an environment filled with viral content, fostering creativity on the part of its users, countless netters produce a substantial body of internet fiction that calls for linguistic analysis. This paper explores a particular sub-genre of modern internet discourse, namely creepypastas, which are horror-like stories, copy-and-pasted around the Internet. The purpose of this study is to explore the language of English creepypastas, to determine certain features appurtenant to the genre, as well as to investigate the scope of netspeak’s influence on these works of fiction.