WTF? Americans and Britons swear greater than Australians on-line, analysis unearths

Australians’ proud recognition as a pack of crafty linguists has taken a success from a find out about discovering they arrive best 3rd within the swearing stakes on-line.

The analysis discovered Australians have been extra restrained – on-line, a minimum of – than potty-mouthed Poms and vulgar Americans.

“What the feck?” because the Irish would say – “feck” being their most popular profanity relative to different international locations’ use of the phrase, in line with the analysis.

For the British it’s “cunt”, and for the USA 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 college of languages and cultures.

“We expected it to be ‘fuck’ or something.”

Schweinberger and his colleague, Monash University’s Prof Kate Burridge, analysed greater than 1.7bn phrases from 20 English-speaking international locations to seek out the frequency of virtually 600 vulgar phrases (and their spelling permutations, comparable to “fuuuuuck”, “feck” or “focking”).

The effects were revealed within the magazine Lingua, and Schweinberger mentioned it used to be the primary large-scale research that mixed conventional linguistics with computational strategies.

To select the phrases, the researchers used “the middle-class politeness criterion” and different 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 recognize that the true international is extra complicated, with culturally particular norms.

One instance cited within the article is the cheeky 2006 “Where the bloody hell are you?” Tourism Australia commercial. That advert – created whilst the previous high minister Scott Morrison used to be managing director – ended in a string of court cases to the United Kingdom promoting regulator.

Another instance of culturally particular variations is “cunt”, which is very offensive in lots of settings. But the authors say it’s now considered by means of more youthful Australians as a “significant part of Australian culture and identity”. High college scholars see it as customary, and normally Australian, and suppose that criticising it’s principally un-Australian.

The researchers say vulgar language is a “natural playground” for unleashing “linguistic creativity”. It faucets into taboos and societal fears, to make an affect via “shock value, the emotional charge and the social fallout when boundaries are breached”.

They discovered swear phrases made up 0.022% of Australian basic on-line content material, which is the typical throughout all of the countries. Britain’s content material used to be 0.025% sweary and the USA got here in at 0.036%.

But there’s a heartening twist to the story that presentations Australians are now not right here to fuck spiders.

One is that the Global Web-Based English Corpus (GloWbE) dataset the researchers used didn’t come with blogs for Australia – and blogs are normally extra sweary than basic on-line content material. But it did come with them for different international locations.

“If we had blog data for Australia it might have pushed us to second place,” Schweinberger says.

He says it might be that during the USA, which is “often associated with Protestant puritanism, Christian fervour, and prudishness”, persons are much less prone to swear in public. That, Schweinberger says, may imply they’re much more likely to let all of it out on-line.

Australians are prone to swear extra head to head, he says, they usually additionally do higher on every other 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.”