Swearing and Cursing

Contexts and Practices in a Critical Linguistic Perspective

Nico Nassenstein, Anne Storch, Nico Nassenstein, Anne Storch

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501511202
• Subtopic: Psycolinguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

While most of the more recent influential work on swearing has concentrated on English and other languages from the Global North, looking at forms and functions of swear words, this contribution redirects the necessary focus onto a sociolinguistics of swearing that puts transgressive practices in non-Western languages into the focus. The transdisciplinary volume contains innovative case studies that address swearing and cursing in parts of the world characterized by consequences of colonialism and increasingly debated inequalities. Turning away from more conventional and established methodologies and theoretical approaches, the book envisages to address transgressive linguistic practices, performances and contexts in Africa, Asia, America and Europe –including individuals' creativity, subversive power and agency. Due to its interdisciplinary and non-mainstream focus, this volume is an essential addition to the field of studies.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Foreword
• Part I: Othering and abjection as deep practice
• 1. “I will kill you today” – Reading “bad language” and swearing through Otherness, mimesis, abjection and camp
• 2. Ten issues facing taboo word scholars
• 3. “Damn your eyes!” (Not really): Imperative imprecatives, and curses as commands
• 4. “Oh, bald father!”: Kinship and swearing among Datooga of Tanzania
• 5. Aesthetics of the obscure: Swearing as horrible play
• 6. “I sh.t in your mouth”: Areal invectives in the Lower Volta Basin (West Africa)
• Part II: Cultural mobility as context of transgression
• 7. The linguistics of Jamaican swearing: Forms, background and adaptations
• 8. ‘Don’t say it in public’: Contestations and negotiations in northern Nigerian Muslim cyberspace
• 9. Mock Chinese in Kinshasa: On Lingala speakers’ offensive language use and verbal hostility
• 10. The name of the wild man: Colonial arbiru in East Timor
• Part III: Disruptive and trashy performance
• 11. Found and lost paradise: Bad language at a beach in Diani, Kenya
• 12. The sexy banana – artifacts of gendered language in tourism
• 13. English- and Spanish-speaking teenagers’ use of rude vocatives
• 14. “He shall not be buried in the West” – Cursing in Ancient Egypt
• Afterword
• Index