Latest news with #vulgarity
Telegraph
26-05-2025
- General
- Telegraph
Britain is world's second most potty-mouthed nation
Data show that Americans use profanity for 0.036 per cent of all words, 44 per cent more often than Britons do, with a rate of 0.025 per cent. However, Australians, known for a wide acceptance of swear words as normal parlance, came only third, at 0.022 per cent. 'Some may find it disappointing, but the research found the United States and Great Britain ranked ahead of Australia in terms of using vulgar language online,' said Dr Martin Schweinberger, the Australian study author. 'One possible explanation is that Australians are more conservative when they write online but not so much when they are face to face. Australians really see vulgarity, swearing and slang as part of our culture – we're very invested in it.' 'Vulgarity very sparingly' Bangladesh, Ghana, Tanzania and Hong Kong were found to be the most polite, with less than 0.01 per cent of all words studied being classified as swearing. However, the study also found that while the overall use of swear words is less than one in 4,500 on average, they are found almost everywhere at least once. In the UK, for example, one in 10 web pages studied contained at least one form of swear word. 'This finding is quite notable, as it suggests that while people use vulgarity very sparingly, the use of vulgar elements in language is highly common with speakers being aware of the discursive functions that the use of vulgarity fulfils,' the study authors wrote. Analysis also found that the US is the biggest proponent of the f-word, with it coming into use more than 80 times per million. Britons were again second, at 60 uses per million words. The study also found unique variants of swear words that were more popular in some countries than others. 'Deep national attachment' For example, the misspelt version of the f-word used in Ireland was found to be used 10 times as often as expected, making it the curse used the most often of any nationality. They add: 'The present results, while confirming high rates of vulgarity in Australian web data, do not support the view that the role of colloquialisation in Australian English is stronger in Australian English compared to British and American English. 'In fact, the United States, often associated with protestant puritanism, Christian fervour and prudishness, shows the highest rates of vulgarity in online discourse, followed by Great Britain.' Australians might well be disheartened when they discover that they are not the top users of profanity among English-speaking countries. 'Their deep national attachment to the vernacular dates back to the original mix of slang, dialect and underworld jargon that gave rise to Australian English — fuelled by anti-authoritarian sentiment, the colloquial part of the language expanded to become the feature that best distinguished the established citizen (or old chum) from the stranger (or new chum). 'Australia's love of vulgarity, and swear words in particular, is very evident in the offline public life of these words.' The scientists argue that it is possible Australians speak more swear words than they write, so the extent of their oral bad language may not be seen in the study. The study was published in the journal Lingua.
The Guardian
23-05-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Americans and Britons swear more online than Australians, research finds. WTF?
Australians' proud reputation as a pack of cunning linguists has taken a hit from a study finding they come only third in the swearing stakes online. The research found Australians were more restrained – online, at least – than potty-mouthed Poms and vulgar Americans. 'What the feck?' as the Irish would say – 'feck' being their preferred profanity relative to other countries' use of the word, according to the research. For the British it's 'cunt', and for the US it's 'asshole'. For Australians, disappointingly, it's 'crap'. 'We were super surprised by that,' says Dr Martin Schweinberger, from the University of Queensland's school of languages and cultures. 'We expected it to be 'fuck' or something.' Schweinberger and his colleague, Monash University's Prof Kate Burridge, analysed more than 1.7bn words from 20 English-speaking countries to find the frequency of almost 600 vulgar words (and their spelling variations, such as 'fuuuuuck', 'feck' or 'focking'). The results have been published in the journal Lingua, and Schweinberger said it was the first large-scale analysis that combined traditional linguistics with computational methods. To pick the words, the researchers used 'the middle-class politeness criterion' and other measures. 'Vulgar language generally refers to words or expressions that are considered rude, offensive, or inappropriate in certain social contexts at a given time,' the researchers wrote. 'The usual suspects that challenge social norms in this way include overlapping categories such as blasphemy, curses, ethnic-racial slurs, insults, name-calling, obscenity, profanity, scatology, slang, swearing, tabooed words, offence, impoliteness, verbal aggression, and more – essentially, any form of speech capable of violating conventional standards of politeness.' They acknowledge that the real world is more complex, with culturally specific norms. One example cited in the article is the cheeky 2006 'Where the bloody hell are you?' Tourism Australia advertisement. That ad – created while the former prime minister Scott Morrison was managing director – resulted in a string of complaints to the UK advertising regulator. Another example of culturally specific differences is 'cunt', which is highly offensive in many settings. But the authors say it is now viewed by younger Australians as a 'significant part of Australian culture and identity'. High school students see it as normal, and typically Australian, and think that criticising it is basically un-Australian. The researchers say vulgar language is a 'natural playground' for unleashing 'linguistic creativity'. It taps into taboos and societal fears, to make an impact through 'shock value, the emotional charge and the social fallout when boundaries are breached'. They found swear words made up 0.022% of Australian general online content, which is the average across all the nations. Britain's content was 0.025% sweary and the US came in at 0.036%. But there is a heartening twist to the tale that shows Australians are not here to fuck spiders. One is that the Global Web-Based English Corpus (GloWbE) dataset the researchers used did not include blogs for Australia – and blogs are typically more sweary than general online content. But it did include them for other countries. 'If we had blog data for Australia it might have pushed us to second place,' Schweinberger says. He says it could be that in the US, which is 'often associated with Protestant puritanism, Christian fervour, and prudishness', people are less likely to swear in public. That, Schweinberger says, might mean they are more likely to let it all out online. Australians are likely to swear more face to face, he says, and they also do better on another measure – creativity. 'What we see with Americans is that they really stick to 'fuck' … they really like that word,' Schweinberger says. 'But when we look at low-frequency words which typically are more creative – like 'cockknuckle' – Australians are actually in second place.'
