The word that perhaps best sums up this welcome addition to the literature on swearing in linguistics is diversity. It is through multiple types of diversity that Kristy Beers Fägersten & Karyn Stapleton explore a phenomenon that, despite its ubiquity across languages, continues to receive insufficient linguistic and scholarly attention.
The book is diverse in the languages studied. While much of the existing research on swearing focuses on varieties of English—an issue not unique to swearing research—much of this book focuses not simply on different languages, but specifically on a number of languages that have been neglected within linguistics. There is Marianne Rathje's exploration of Danish childrens’ television, Minna Hjort on folk-linguistic definitions of swearing in Finnish, and Beers Fägersten's work on how ‘fuck’ has become commonplace in the Swedish print media. The last of these is also one of many chapters that explores language in contact; the influence of English swearwords on other languages and cultures is explored in Hong Kong, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Sweden. Eline Zenner, Tom Ruette, & Emma Devriendt also observe dialectal variation in Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch.
The book is also diverse in the linguistic and semiotic forms in which swearing is displayed. Bernie Chun Nam Mak & Erika Darics analyse the use of a workplace instant-messaging application; they observe the combination not just of English and Chinese characters but also of emojis. Workers can tailor their swearing in a second or foreign language in a visual written form that contrasts to spoken interaction. Alternatively, Tomoko Shimoyama, Fereidoon Shadpayam, & Mary Parhizgari use a corpus of spontaneous swearing in Persian, a language in which swearing can only be considered if it has basis in God's authority, collected from ethnographic recordings and from fieldnotes. Twitter also serves as a domain for multiple chapters. Michael Gaulthier & Adrien Guille observe gendered patterns in teenage swearing on Twitter through collocate analysis; the visual representations of an individual word, in this case ‘bitch’, and its collocates show the extent of their innovative, multi-layered analysis.
Finally, the book is methodologically diverse. A number of the chapters analyse large corpora in order to draw wider conclusions about particular populations. Matteo Di Cristofaro & Tony McEnery analyse Italian swearing in ItWaC, a two-billion-word corpus of informal texts collected from the internet, for variations on the expression rompere + ART + N. In contrast, Alexandra Jaffe observes the use of ‘fuck’ in French in stance-taking acts; her qualitative analysis of written, online interactions provide insights into positionality not gained through corpus research. Rathje combines quantitative frequency analysis and qualitative linguistic analysis to explore the changing role of swearing on Danish children's television. As well as observing the use of swearwords in this form, Rathje also explores how language use on television can align with real life.
This book's commitment to diversifying the field of swearing research is most welcome. The examples it provides for new work, beyond what is explored here, should illuminate the complex linguistic and social nature of swearing.
