Cover not available
Part of
Advances in Swearing Research: New languages and new contexts
Edited by Kristy Beers Fägersten and Karyn Stapleton
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 282] 2017
► pp. 107–136

Chapter 5
The borrowability of English swearwords

An exploration of Belgian Dutch and Netherlandic Dutch tweets

| University of Leuven
| University of Leuven
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.English swearwords in Dutch tweets
    • 2.1Swearing and pluricentricity: The Low Countries
    • 2.2Contact-induced variation and change: Borrowing swearwords
    • 2.3Swearing and social media
  • 3.Research questions
  • 4.Data and method
    • 4.1Set of source-language swearwords and insults: Online swearword inventories
    • 4.2Verification in a receptor language corpus: Twitter in the Low Countries
  • 5.Pluricentric variation in the borrowability of English swearwords in Dutch
    • 5.1Which words borrowed are borrowed, and why? Factors influencing borrowability
      • 5.1.1Denotational category
      • 5.1.2Offensiveness
      • 5.1.3Speech economy
      • 5.1.4Foreignness
      • 5.1.5Exposure to the source language form
    • 5.2Discussion of the quantitative findings
  • 6.Qualitative exploration of Dutch tweeps’ creativity with English swearwords
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 October 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.282.06zen
References
Andersen, Gisle
2014 “Pragmatic Borrowing.” Journal of Pragmatics 67: 17–33. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Andersson, Lars-Gunnar, and Peter Trudgill
1990 Bad Language. London: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Androutsopoulos, Jannis
2015 “Networked Multilingualism: Some Language Practices on Facebook and Their Implications.” International Journal of Bilingualism 19 (2): 185–205. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Backus, Ad
1996 Two in One. Bilingual Speech of Turkish Immigrants in The Netherlands. Tilburg: Tilburg University Press.Google Scholar
2013 “A Usage-Based Approach to Borrowability.” In New Perspectives on Lexical Borrowing, ed. by Eline Zenner and Gitte Kristiansen, 19–40. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bailey, Lee Ann, and Leonora Timm
1976 “More on Women’s – and Men’s – Expletives.” Anthropological Linguistics 18: 438–449.Google Scholar
Beers Fägersten, Kristy
2007 “A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Swear Word Offensiveness.” Saarland Working Papers in Linguistics 1: 14–37.Google Scholar
2012 Who’s Swearing Now? The Social Aspects of Conversational Swearing. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.Google Scholar
Belling, Luc, and Julia De Bres
2014 “Digital Superdiversity in Luxembourg: The Role of Luxembourgish in a Multilingual Facebook Group.” Discourse, Context & Media 4–5: 74–86. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chesley, Paula, and Harald Baayen
2010 “Predicting New Words from Newer Words: Lexical Borrowings in French.” Linguistics 484: 1343–1374.Google Scholar
Clyne, Michael
1992 Pluricentric Languages: Differing Norms in Different Nations. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Cruse, Alan
1986 Lexical Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Curnow, Timothy J
2001 “What Language Features Can Be ‘Borrowed’? In Areal Diffusion and Genetic Inheritance: Problems in Comparative Linguistics, ed. by Aleksandra Iur’evna Aĭkhenval’d and Robert M. W. Dixon, 412–436. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Dewaele, Jean-Marc
2010 “ ‘Christ fucking shit merde!’ Language Preferences for Swearing among Maximally Proficient Multilinguals.” Sociolinguistic Studies 4 (3): 595–614.Google Scholar
2016 “Thirty Shades of Offensiveness: L1 and LX English users’ Understanding, Perception and Self-Reported Use of Negative Emotion-Laden Words.” Journal of Pragmatics 94: 112–127. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Doğruöz, Seza, and Ad Backus
2009 “Innovative Constructions in Dutch Turkish: An Assessment of Ongoing Contact-Induced Change.” Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 121: 41–63. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Eisenstein, Jacob
2014 “Identifying Regional Dialects in Online Social Media.” To be published in The Handbook of Dialectology.Google Scholar
Eleta, Irene, and Jennifer Golbeck
2014 “Multilingual Use of Twitter: Social Networks as the Language Frontier.” Computers in Human Behaviour 41: 424–432. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Furiassi, Cristiano, Virginia Pulcini, and Félix Rodriguez-González
2012 The Anglicization of European Lexis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Geeraerts, Dirk
2010 “Lexical Variation in Space.” In Language in Space. An International Handbook of Linguistic Variation. Volume 1: Theories and Methods, ed. by Peter Auer and Jürgen Erich Schmidt, 821–837. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Görlach, Manfred
2002 An Annotated Bibliography of European Anglicisms. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Halim, Nur S., and Marlyna Maros
2014 “The Functions of Code-switching in Facebook Interactions.” Social and Behavioural Sciences 118: 126–133.Google Scholar
Harris, Catherine. L
2004 “Bilingual Speakers in the Lab: Psychophysiological Measures of Emotional Reactivity.” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 25: 223–247. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hughes, Geoffrey
1998 Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity in English. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
2006 An Encyclopedia of Swearing. The Social History of Oaths, Profanity, Foul Language, and Ethnic Slurs in the English-Speaking World. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Jacops, Shanna
2005 Vloeken in strips: een vergelijking tussen Vlaamse en Nederlandse kinder- en volwassenenstrips. Unpublished MA thesis, KU Leuven.Google Scholar
Jay, Timothy, and Kristen Janschewitz
2008 “The Pragmatics of Swearing.” Journal of Politeness Research 4: 267–288. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jennes, R
1999 Schrappen wat niet past…: vloeken en schelden in de ondertiteling. Unpublished MA Thesis, KU Leuven.Google Scholar
Lantto, Hanna
2014 “Code-switching, Swearing and Slang: The Colloquial Register of Basque in Greater Bilbao.” International Journal of Bilingualism 186: 633–648. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ljung, Magnus
2011 Swearing: A Cross-Cultural Linguistic Study. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.Google Scholar
Matras, Yaron
2009 Language Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Montagu, Ashley
1967 The Anatomy of Swearing. London: Rapp and Whiting.Google Scholar
Mufwene, Salikoko
2002 “Competition and Selection in Language Evolution.” Selection 1: 45–56. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Onysko, Alexander
2007 Anglicisms in German: Borrowing, Lexical Productivity and Written Codeswitching. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Poplack, Shana, David Sankoff, and Christopher Miller
1988 “The Social Correlates and Linguistic Processes of Lexical Borrowing and Assimilation.” Linguistics 26: 47–104. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rawson, Hugh
1989 Wicked Words: A Treasury of Curses, Insults, Put-Downs, and Other Formerly Unprintable Terms from Anglo-Saxon Times to the Present. New York: Crown Publishers.Google Scholar
Ruette, Tom
Submitted. “Regional Variation in the Source Domains for Dutch Swearing.” In Linguistic Taboo Revisited. Novel Insights from Cognitive Perspectives ed. by Andrea Pizzaro Pedraza Berlin Mouton de Gruyter
Sagmeister-Brandner, Sonja
2008 Breaking news: so kommen englische Wörter ins Radio und Fernsehen: eine empirische Studie österreichischer Nachrichten zwischen 1967–2004. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Spears, Richard. A
1981 Slang and Euphemism: A Dictionary of Oaths, Curses, Insults, Sexual Slang and Metaphor, Racial Slurs, Drug Talk, Homosexual Lingo, and Related Matters. Middle Village, NY: David Publishers.Google Scholar
Speelman, Dirk, Stefan Grondelaers, and Dirk Geeraerts
2003 “Profile-Based Linguistic Uniformity as a Generic Method for Comparing Language Varieties.” Computers and the Humanities 37: 317–337. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stefanowitsch, Anatol
2002 “Nice to miet you: Bilingual Puns and the Status of English in Germany.” Intercultural Communication Studies 114: 67–84.Google Scholar
Van Hout, Roeland, and Pieter Muysken
1994 “Modeling Lexical Borrowability.” Language Variation and Change 61: 39–62. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Van Sterkenburg, Petrus
1997 Vloeken: een cultuurbepaalde reactie op woede, irritatie en frustratie. Leiden: ’s-Gravenhage SDU.Google Scholar
2000 Krachttermen: scheldwoorden, vervloekingen, verwensingen, beledigingen, smeekbeden en bezweringen. Schiedam: ScriptumGoogle Scholar
2008 Vloeken is niet meer wat het geweest is. Brussel: VUBPRESS.Google Scholar
Viera, Anthony, and Joanne Garrett
2005 “Understanding Interobserver Agreement: The Kappa Statistic.” Family Medicine 375: 360–363.Google Scholar
Wang, Wenbo, Lu Chen, Thirunarayan Krishnaprasad, and Amit Sheth
2014 “Cursing in English on Twitter.” Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing: 415–424.
Wieling, Martijn, Jelke Bloem, Kaitlin Mignella, Mona Timmermeister, and John Nerbonne
2014 “Automatically Measuring the Strength of Foreign Accents in English.” Language Dynamics and Change. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Yuan, Huang, Diansheng Guo, Alice Kasakoff, and Jack Grieve
2015 “Understanding US Regional Linguistic Variation with Twitter Data Analysis.” Computers, Environment and Urban Systems. Available online.Google Scholar
Zenner, Eline, Dirk Speelman, and Dirk Geeraerts
2012 “Cognitive Sociolinguistics Meets Loanword Research: Measuring Variation in the Frequency of Anglicisms in Dutch.” Cognitive Linguistics 234: 749–792.Google Scholar
2013a “Core Vocabulary, Borrowability and Entrenchment: A Usage-Based Onomasiological Approach.” Diachronica 311: 74–105.Google Scholar
2013b “What Makes a Catchphrase Catchy? Possible Determinants in the Borrowability of English Catchphrases in Dutch.” In New Perspectives on Lexical Borrowing, ed. by Eline Zenner and Gitte Kristiansen, 41–64. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2015 “A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Borrowing in Weak Contact Situations: English Loanwords and Phrases in Expressive Utterances in a Dutch Reality TV Show.” International Journal of Bilingualism 193: 333–346. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 3 other publications

Beers Fägersten, Kristy & Karyn Stapleton
2022. Swearing. In Handbook of Pragmatics [Handbook of Pragmatics, ], ► pp. 129 ff. DOI logo
Coats, Steven
2021. ‘Bad language’ in the Nordics: profanity and gender in a social media corpus. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 53:1 ► pp. 22 ff. DOI logo
Zenner, Eline & Dorien Van De Mieroop
2021. The (near) absence of English in Flemish dinner table conversations. Applied Linguistics Review 12:2 ► pp. 299 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 7 september 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.