NATIVE VS. NON-NATIVE VARIATION IN ENGLISH FOOD BLOGS: A MULTIDIMENSIONAL ANALYSIS OF LANGUAGE AND STYLE

Abstract

English food blogs constitute a rapidly growing form of digital discourse, yet limited research has examined how linguistic and stylistic patterns vary between native and non-native English bloggers. This study investigates linguistic and stylistic variations in English food blogs authored by native British and non-native Pakistani bloggers within Douglas Biber’s (1988) Multidimensional Analysis (MDA) framework. Adopting an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design, the study compiled a specialized corpus of 100 food blog posts (50 native and 50 non-native) through purposive sampling. The corpus was analyzed using the Multidimensional Analysis Tagger (MAT) to identify lexico-grammatical patterns and multidimensional stylistic features. The findings revealed a shared genre core characterized by frequent use of nouns, determiners, prepositions, and adjectives, confirming the informational and descriptive baseline of food blogging. However, significant stylistic differences emerged between the two groups. Native bloggers demonstrated a highly informational, elaborated, and non-persuasive style consistent with Learned Exposition, and additionally relied more heavily on cardinal numbers to emphasize quantitative precision. In contrast, non-native Pakistani bloggers exhibited a more interactive style aligned with General Narrative Exposition and Involved Persuasion, marked by greater use of present-tense verbs and personal pronouns. Independent samples t-tests confirmed that these differences were systematic and statistically significant across all six functional dimensions, with five showing highly significant variance (p < .001). These findings suggest that language background shapes rhetorical identity in digital discourse. The study concludes that non-native bloggers adapt to the participatory nature of online communication by constructing community-oriented registers rather than deviating from native norms. These results challenge deficit-oriented perspectives in Second Language Acquisition and contribute to corpus linguistics and digital discourse studies by offering new insights into stylistic variation in online food blogging.