ENGL276
they are only used by one
or two of the informants,
it is clear that the hearers
understand what this word
means. It seems in the male
interaction, using BLWs that
are less standardised helps
to increase the feeling of
solidarity and belonging to a
specific community in which
they can share this lexicon.
This difference in standard
and non-standard language
use within males and
females has been noticed
by many linguists. Trudgill
(1972), for instance, picks up
on the sensitivity to prestige
language-use in females more so than males - and
thus women are more likely
to use standard English
or even hypercorrectness
in their own language. In
Coates’s work she states
that women are more likely
to be influenced by the
publicly legitimised standard
norms, and men are more
likely to be influenced by
non-standard
vernacular
norms (2004, p.44). This is
confirmed by the fact that
McEnery ‘s scale of offence
did not include some of
the BLWs found within
my own data collection,
predominantly the words
used by males. Although
both males and females
use the dict ionary defined,
standardised
norms
in
the language sphere of
swearing, it is clear that the
more non-standard choices
are mainly by males and
not females. Again, this
is particularly noticeable
in the all-male interaction
and not so much in the
mixed-sex group, although
it is still present. We can
see from this that it is a
particular feature of allmale
interaction, and adapted
slightly so as to maintain
a sense of solidarity in the
mixed-sex situation.
When we look at the found
instances of bad language
(left) in relation to the scale
of offence table, it gives
inconclusive results. As
there are only two variants
in the ‘strong’ category, the
overall results show that
there are just as many ‘mild’
BLWs used as the most
popular swearwords, ‘fuck’
and ‘fucking’. These two
BLWs are popular in each
interaction,
suggesting
the scale of offensiveness
of these words is not
considered to be strong.
Words categorised into
the ‘very strong’ category
are not present in any of
the interactions, perhaps
because even in a group of
friends, same-sex or mixed,
they are still considered too
offensive to use.
What can be picked up
from this data, however, are
differences in the types of
BLWs used. For instance,
the all-male and mixedsex interactions use BLW
s as negative adjectives to
describe people: ‘pikeys’,
‘wankers’, ‘arsehole’, ‘dicks’,
‘bitches’ etc. The all-female
interaction shows that they
use BLWs as an adverbial
booster, such as ‘I’m so
fucking hungry’, more than
negative adjectives for
people. Such adverbial
boosters are still a common
feature in male interaction,
but the BLWs from males
also include the negative
35
adjective BLWs, suggesting
this is a particular feature of
their interaction.
A shared feature of the
different groups is the use of
BLWs as a noun for several
body parts, such as ‘fanny’,
‘willy’, ‘bum’, ‘boobs’. This
language is present in both
single-sex
interactions
and
the
mixed-sex
interaction, suggesting this
is something which is used
by both genders regardless
of who they are talking with.
However, the frequent use
of ‘willy’ in the all-female
interaction is not present in
the male interaction or the
mixed-sex interaction. This
is notable when compared
with the fact that female
body part BLWs are present
in all the interactions. If
we were to look into this
from Lakoff’s perspective,
it could be suggested that
talking about female bodies
using taboo language is
more acceptable.
When I asked the various
informants whether and why
they thought there would be
more swearing in a male/
female group interactions
or a mixed-sex interaction,
several answers were very
similar. One female speaker
claimed, ‘in my experience,
boys swear more than girls
and more harshly,’ and
another female speaker
claimed that, ‘I think I swear
more when I’m just with the
girls as it’s more open in
general, but I would imagine
boys swear more than girls’.
This again occurred in
another female speaker’s
answer: ‘in a female-only
setting, girls will swear more