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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 563

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

Swearing in three generations of spoken Danish

Authors: Rathje, Marianne
Submitted by: Rathje, Marianne (The Danish Language Council, Denmark)

Young people are often accused of swearing all the time and thereby making the language bad. In my PhD thesis (Rathje 2010, 2011) I have investigated young people's use of swear words as compared with middleaged and older people’s swearing: Do young Danes swear more frequently than other generations? The study shows that the generations use the same amount of swear words when speaking - but it is different types of swear word that they use. Young Danes use English swear words and expletives from the taboo area "lower bodily functions", whereas the middle-aged and older generations use rephrased swear words and religious swearing. I also compared the use of swearing in intragenerational conversations with swearing in intergenerational conversations to find out whether the participants change the amount and type of expletives when the interlocutor's age changes. For this analysis, the Communication Accommodation Theory (Giles et al. 1991) was used. The comparison revealed that the generations use the same types of swear words no matter who they are talking to, that is regardless of their interlocutor’s age, but the three generations all swear mostly with young people. In my paper, I will also touch on what my results may say about language change and age grading (Eckert 1997).

References

Eckert, P. (1997): ”Age as a sociolinguistic variabel”, i: F. Coulmas (ed.): The Handbook of Sociolingiustics, Blackwell, Cambridge, p. 151-157.

Giles, H., Coupland, N., and Coupland, J. (1991): ‘Accommodation Theory: Communication, Context, and Consequence,’ in H. Giles, N. Coupland, and J. Coupland (eds.), Contexts of Accommodation. Developments in Applied Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Rathje, M. (2010): Generationssprog [The Language use in three generations of spoken Danish], Dansk Sprognævns skrifter 43, København.

Rathje, M. (2011): ”Fuck, fandme og for pokker. Danske bandeord i tre generationers talesprog” [Fuck, fandme and for pokker. Danish swearwords in the speech of three generations], i: Språk och stil 21, p. 81-109.