In this poster presentation, I present an analysis of a 100,000 word corpus consisting of message board entries on hip-hop music and culture. This sample corpus clearly shows that the contributors write in a manner characteristic of spoken language, but that they also exploit the medium of the message board to further identify themselves linguistically in ways which are not possible in speech. This corpus thus serves to exemplify the new wave of "real language" which corpus linguistics has yet to account for. Furthermore, the analysis addresses the problem of knowing "real speakers" by considering speaker identity not as a combination of sociolinguistic variables, but as a linguistic construction of self.