Sexual Language Usage in German, Polish and Spanish Swearwords (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,7, University of Cologne (Englisches Seminar), course: Sex, Sexuality and Language, language: English, abstract: Language is a multifaceted medium and sophisticated system of communication. It has many characteristics and functions - informing, advising, arguing, asking, suggesting or expressing feelings, to name just a few. The last function is, in particular, also the one that is essential and most important here, as the issue of this study is to examine the emotionally charged obscenities, more precisely, anger and aggressiveness that is expressed through the speech. American English, as any other language, contains a number of words that are used for the purpose of insulting people(Aman, 1972: 161). What character swearing has within a certain language depends, however, on the determined sociocultural norms, taboos, cognitions about the world and linguistic conventions of an ethnic group(Jay, 2008: 267). Reinhold Aman, the author of the Bayrisch-österreichisches Schimpfwörterbuch, argues that this is the reason for the unique set of offensive words within each country(Aman, 1972: 161). In terms of English, "there are hundreds of taboo words and phrases [used for swearing]; the semantic range of referents that are considered taboo is [however] limited in scope. Taboos in English are placed primarily on sexual references [...]" (Jay, 2009: 154). Based on these facts, the purpose of this research is to find out whether several European languages, in this case, German, Spanish and Polish - all belonging to distinct language families, use insults in a sexual manner as well.In doing so, this research is based, in general, on the publications of Timothy Jay, an author, who is the precursor in the area of the speech of violence, and who has edited many scientific works on that specific topic. In order to provide information about the essential concepts and to avoid any disambiguations, first of all, some basic terms and aspects, that are relevant for the comprehension and proper treatment of the issue, will be explained. Following, the method, namely, the procedure and selection criteria of the interviewed subjects, will go more into detail, before at last, the analysis and evaluation of the responses will be demonstrated.