Swearing in Modern British English: The Case of Fuck in the BNC

Abstract

Swearing is a part of everyday language use. To date it has been infrequently studied, though some recent work on swearing in American English, Australian English and British English has addressed the topic. Nonetheless, there is still no systematic account of swear-words in English. In terms of approaches, swearing has been approached from the points of view of history, lexicography, psycholinguistics and semantics. There have been few studies of swearing based on sociolinguistic variables such as gender, age and social class. Such a study has been difficult in the absence of corpus resources. With the production of the British National Corpus (BNC), a 100,000,000-word balanced corpus of modern British English, such a study became possible. In addition to parts of speech, the corpus is richly annotated with metadata pertaining to demographic features such as age, gender and social class, and textual features such as register, publication medium and domain. While bad language may be related to religion (e.g. Jesus, heaven, hell and damn), sex (e.g. fuck), racism (e.g. nigger), defecation (e.g. shit), homophobia (e.g. queer) and other matters, we will, in this article, examine only the pattern of uses of fuck and its morphological variants, because this is a typical swear-word that occurs frequently in the BNC. This article will build and expand upon the examination of fuck by McEnery et al. (2000) by examining the distribution pattern of fuck within and across spoken and written registers.

Self-reported frequency of swearing in English: do situational, psychological and sociobiographical variables have similar effects on first and foreign language users?

“…The LX users also display an almost inverted bell curve for swearing alone, with both teenagers and those aged 60 and above reporting the most frequent swearing. While the general patterns for age conform broadly with the findings of earlier studies (McEnery and Xiao 2004;Rayson, Leech and Hodge 1997;Schwartz et al 2013), they also show a much more complex and nuanced picture, with different patterns for different interlocutors, and some interesting differences between L1 and LX users.…”

“…Among L1 users the effect was significant with friends, family, colleagues and strangers, among LX users the effect was only significant with friends. Lower education levels were typically linked to more self-reported swearing, which reflects findings in sociolinguistic research (McEnery and Xiao 2004;Rayson, Leech and Hodge 1997). The fact that the effect of education was only significant with friends and alone among LX users suggests that their swearing frequency is not strongly linked to their social class (if we agree that education level is a proxy).…”

“…Under-35's were also more likely to use these words, in addition to "shit", while skilled working class and working class speakers were also more frequent users of these words, as well as "bloody" (10). The sociolinguistic study of the use of "fuck" in modern British English by McEnery and Xiao (2004) showed that the word "fuck" in the BNC occurs more frequently in the speech of men (240), teenagers and young adults (241), speakers from lower social classes and people who left school at age 15-16 (246).…”

Thirty shades of offensiveness: L1 and LX English users’ understanding, perception and self-reported use of negative emotion-laden words

“…Skilled working class and working class speakers stood out for their higher use of "fucking" and "bloody" (p. 10). The BNC has also been used by McEnery and Xiao (2004) who looked at the use of "fuck" in modern British English. The word was found to be linked to a range of independent variables, appearing much more frequently in dialogues than in monologues.…”

Religious references in contemporary Irish English: ‘for the love of God almighty. . . . I'm a holy terror for turf’

“…Methodological approaches to the examination of taboo language have undergone a recent shift, and while questionnaires gather information on people's perception of their linguistic patterns and have been used in data collection (Bailey and Timm 1976;Hughes 1992), corpus-based approaches focusing on linguistic forms in more naturally occurring settings are now prevalent (Stenströ m 1991(Stenströ m , 2006McEnery and Xiao 2004). Such a trend is popular and fitting at a time when more spoken corpora are becoming available, with some even being made accessible on the Internet accompanied by sound and refined search tools (Stenströ m 2006).…”