The use of swear words by women: a study of single sex and mix sex conversations

• Main Author: Gati, Pia
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Högskolan i Halmstad, Akademin för lärande, humaniora och samhälle 2015
• Subjects: Swear words; women; gender constellations; motifs; functions; gender; single sex; mix sex; corpus transcripts; American English; General Language Studies and Linguistics; Jämförande språkvetenskap och allmän lingvistik
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hh:diva-27709

This essay discusses women’s use of swear words in both single sex constellations and mix sex constellations. Its primary aim is to find out which swear words women use the most. The secondary aim is to see what communicative function they have in the women’s usage. As a final point, the tertiary aim is to discover in what gender constellation women swear the most. In this research, a combination of quantitative and qualitative methodology is used. The quantitative methodology is used to find out which words are the most common, and the qualitative methodology is used to examine which communicative functions they converse, as well as to study how the different gender constellations effect the usage of dirty language. The analysis of this essay is divided into these three parts - which words, which communicative functions, and the effect of gender constellations - and concludes and confirms previous research in this narrow and rare field of investigation. This paper shows that women swear less than men but more when they are in the company of their own gender. It also displays which words are the most common, both in tables and in discussion. Finally, this essay shows the most common functions of the chosen swear words women use.