Mind your language! Swearing around the world

The reason I can say this is because I am writing in English, not Finnish, Dutch, or Québécois French.

You might think that the definition of ‘bad’ words would be similar around the world. You wouldn’t be entirely right. Strong language – swearing, profanity, whatever you want to call it – is special.

If everyday language is like the earth’s crust and the soil we garden our lives in, strong language is like volcanoes and geysers erupting through it from the mantle below. Our social traditions determine which parts of the crust are the thin points. It’s not enough to feel strongly about something; it has to have a dominating societal power and control structure attached to it. Strong language often involves naming things you desire but aren’t supposed to desire; at the very least, it aims to upset power structures that may seem a bit too arbitrary.

We tend to think of swear words as one entity, but they actually serve several distinct functions. Steven Pinker, in The Stuff of Thought, lists five different ways we can swear: “descriptively (Let’s fuck), idiomatically (It’s fucked up), abusively (Fuck you…!), emphatically (This is fucking amazing), and cathartically (Fuck!!!).” None of these functions requireswearwords. In Bikol (a language of the Philippines), there’s a special anger vocabulary – many words have alternative words that refer to just the same thing but also mean you’re angry. In Luganda (an African language), you can make a word insulting just by changing its noun class prefix – from a class for persons to a class for certain kinds of objects, for instance. In Japanese, you can insult someone badly just by using an inappropriate form of ‘you’.

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Mind your language! Swearing around the world