SotA Anthology 2015-16
As part of ENGL276: Language in Society, students get the chance to conduct
some small-scale sociolinguistic research. Module tutor Dr Paul Cooper picked
out the work of second-year BA English student, Isobel Randall.
‘I imagine boys swear more’
Examining gender and language
We now know from various
different studies that the
statement that ‘men swear
more than women’ is a myth,
and that bad language in
fact makes up a large part
of everyday interaction for
both males and females. I
am therefore not going to
study merely which gender,
if any, swears more, but
will analyse what swearing
means for both genders
and whether the influence
of a mixed or single-sex
interaction affects the habits
of bad language use.
There has been much
research
into
female
language and all-female
interaction (Coates 2004),
however I question whether
this truly reflects their
everyday language use
if they are speaking with
both males and females.
The same can be said of
male language use; a rugby
locker-room conversation
is not going to reflect the
language of a male in a room
far from the changing rooms
with both males and females
present. It is important to
analyse the language used
by both genders when they
are in an exclusively male
or female interaction, but it
is important to also study
language used by men
and women when they are
together to truly identify the
differences. The question I
want to raise in my research
is whether swearing is a
static feature within male
and females’ language use,
even when changing who
they are interacting with. If
there is indeed a variation
depending on the gender of
the speaker, I hypothesise
that the men wiill be
using more offensive bad
language words (BLWs) to
describe a person.
The study of swearing in the
English language has been
led by Tony McEnery in his
work Swearing in English
(2006).
In
McEnery’s
writing, the issue of BLWs
is analysed from 1586 to
the present and looks into
social factors such as age,
gender, and social class
and the consequences of
these in the use of BLWs.
From this study we can
firmly establish that the view
of men swearing more than
women is simply not true.
McEnery proceeds from
this to analyse the specific
expletives used by both men
and women, suggesting that
males have a preference
for ‘stronger’ profanities
than females (2006, p.34).
This creates a new issue
in the use of swearing
in language that can be
studied: whether there is
a difference in the BLWs
used by men and women,
and what this could mean in
relation to sociolinguistics,
and specifically language
and gender. McEnery uses
corpus-based data in order
to collect his research.
This is particularly useful in
gaining a large number of
swear words used by males
and females. For such a
large study such as his,
the corpus data is indeed
best. He is certainly able to
reflect a large proportion of
a community with corpus
data. However, it does not
give enough context to
enable us to study other
factors that may affect bad
language use.