One might be suspicious of soap opera dialogue. After all, it is written by a scriptwriter. How well does it really represent authentic, "spoken" language? Let's take a look at this is some detail. In each case, we'll compare the soap opera scripts with the spoken portion of COCA, and the spoken portion of the BNC. We'll see that in most cases, the soap opera language in SOAP is actually much more informal than these other two corpora.

The following table shows the frequency per million words, and you can click on any of the entries to see the actual examples from the three corpora. For COCA and the BNC, look at the SPOKEN column of the chart. For SOAP, look at the ALL column at the left.

query	example	SOAP	BNC *	COCA
. you [vv*] me ?	. You heard me? (=subject ellipsis)	10.3	0.0	0.2
, ok\|okay ?	we're leaving now, OK?	1098.7	34.8	38.2
, right ?	you're pretty tired, right?	536.0	27.7	140.0
I'm good	I'm good	19.1	0.2	1.4
[be] so not [ADJ]	That is so not possible.	3.5	0.0	0.2
I told you	I told you to get out of here	208.5	38.7	11.5
[do] n't get it	I don't get it -- why do you hate me so much?	36.7	9.0	8.1
how can you	How can you even say that?	58.6	19.5	16.7
I totally	I totally get it now!	13.5	3.7	2.0
[screw] [PRON]	I'm not gonna screw it up this time.	13.3	4.5	1.8
[freak] [PRON] out	Man, that totally freaked us out !	10.7	0.2	0.9
[creep] [PRON] out	He really creeps me out -- he's so gross!	2.9	0.0	0.2
my God	My God -- she's horrible!	41.3	20.0	3.8
. it 's [ADJ] .	. It's sad. She's totally forgotten him. (=short phrases)	133.9	34.3	31.5
Situational (shows that the soap opera scripts are very oriented to the "here and now")
hand me * [NOUN]	Hand me a towel.	3.3	0.2	0.3
. Get out	. Get out before I call the police!	18.7	2.7	2.2
Do n't leave	Don't leave! I need you!	3.8	0.7	0.4
Soap opera transcripts = low frequencies for formal phenomena (opposite of above)
whom [do] [PRON]	To whom does she really belong?	0.3	0.6	0.8
to which	the extent to which Dinah was willing to go	1.3	21.5	11.8
must [vv*]	you must know that whatever it takes...	70.4	186.4	104.0

As far as the comparisons with the BNC, some might argue that it's not fair to compare a recent corpus like the Soap Opera corpus with a 20 year-old corpus like the BNC. But that's the point -- the BNC has become increasingly outdated at representing current spoken English. And if you doubt that some of these are now used in the UK -- like I'm good, [freak] PRON out, or [creep] PRON out -- just Google them (limiting the searches to the UK).