A case study of ritual cursing as a form of teasing in Romani
Dániel Z. Kádár | Dalian University of Foreign Languages | Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Andrea Szalai | Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
The present paper examines the ways in which ritual cursing operates as a form of teasing in (Gabor) Roma
communities. By ‘ritual cursing’ we mean forms of curse that are believed to cause harm to the cursed person or people related to
them, i.e. cursing studied here differs from swearing and ‘cussing’, as it embodies supernatural beliefs to a degree. While
cursing is an archetype of ritual, to date little pragmatic research has been done on this phenomenon, supposedly due to the
scarcity of interactional data collected in cultures where cursing is actively practised; thus, the present paper fills a
knowledge gap in the field. We examine cursing in interactions where it is used as teasing in order to socialise young children.
Since ritual is a means through which social structures are re-created (Durkheim 1912
[1954/2001]), aiding young language users to acquire rituals is a key aspect of community life. However, little
research has been done on the ways in which ritual practices are socialised in communities at the level of interaction, which
validates our focus on teasing curses. The phenomenon studied is also relevant to previous sociopragmatic research on teasing:
whilst in other (non-ritual) sociocultural settings socialising teasing implies aiding young language users to distinguish between
humour and offence, due to the potential harm attributed to ritual cursing its socialisation is centred both on harm and the
offence in the conventional sense of the word.
2004 “Ntam ‘Reminiscential Oath’ Taboo in Akan.” Language in Society 331: 317–342.
Atkinson, J. Maxwell, and John Heritage
1999 “Jeffersons’s Transcript Notation.” In The Discourse Reader, ed. by Adam Jaworsky and Nicolas Coupland, 158–166. London: Routledge.
Bax, Marcel
2010 “Epistolary Presentation Rituals: Face-work, Politeness, and Ritual Display in Early-Modern Dutch Letter Writing.” In Historical (Im)Politeness, ed. by Jonathan Culpeper and Daniel Z. Kádár, 37–86. Bern: Peter Lang.
Berta, Péter
2019Materializing Difference. Consumer Culture, Politics and Ethnicity among Romanian Roma. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Blount, Ben G., and Elise Padgug
1977 “Prosodic, Paralinguistic, and Interactional Features in Parent–Child Speech: English and Spanish.” Journal of Child Language 4 (1): 67–86.
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana
1997Dinner Talk: Cultural Patterns of Sociability and Socialization in Family Discourse. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Cameron, Deborah
2005 “Gender and Language Ideologies.” In The Handbook of Language and Gender, ed. by Janet Holmes and Miriam Meyerhoff, 447–467. Oxford: Blackwell.
Collins, Randall
2004Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Croom, Adam
2013 “How to Do Things with Slurs: Studies in the Way of Derogatory Words.” Language & Communication 33 (3): 177–204.
Davies, Douglas
1997Death, Ritual and Belief: The Rhetoric of Funerary Rites. London: Bloomsbury.
Durkheim, Émile
1912 [1954/2001]The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Trans. Carol Cosman. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Durkheim, Émile
2012Moral Education. Trans. Everett K. Wilson, and Herman Schnurer. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.
Eder, Donna
1993 “ ‘Go get ya a French!’: Romantic and Sexual Teasing among Adolescent Girls.” In Gender and Conversational Interaction, ed. by Deborah Tannen, 17–31. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Eisenberg, Ann R.
1986 “Teasing: Verbal Play in Two Mexicano Homes.” In Language Socialization across Cultures, ed. by Bambi B. Schieffelin and Elinor Ochs, 182–198. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Emmons, Sally L.
2000 “A Disarming Laughter: The Role of Humor in Tribal Cultures. An Examination of Humor in Contemporary Native American Literature and Art.” Doctoral thesis, University of Oklahoma.
Fosztó, László
2008 “Taking the Oath: Religious Aspects of Moral Personhood among the Romungre.” In Roma/Zigeunerkulturen in neuen Perspektiven. Roma/Gypsy Cultures in New Perspectives, ed. by Jacobs Fabian and Johannes Ries, 119–133. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag.
Garde, Murray
2008 “The Pragmatics of Rude Jokes with Grandad: Joking Relationships in Aboriginal Australia.” Anthropological Forum 18 (3): 235–253.
Glenn, Phillip
2003Laughter in Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goddard, Cliff
2015 “ ‘Swear Words’ and ‘Curse Words’ in Australian (and American) English. At the Crossroads of Pragmatics, Semantics and Sociolinguistics.” Intercultural Pragmatics 12 (2): 189–218.
Goffman, Erving
1967Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. New York: Anchor Books.
Gregersen, Edgar A.
2004 “Romani Insults.” Maledicta 131: 73–79.
Gumperz, John J.
1992 “Contextualization and Understanding.” In Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon, ed. by Alessandro Duranti and Charles Goodwin, 229–252. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gumperz, John J.
2003 “Contextualization Conventions.” In Sociolinguistics: The Essential Readings, ed. by Christina Bratt Paulston and Richard G. Tuker, 139–155. Oxford: Blackwell.
Halmari, Helena
2004 “Finnish Maledicta and Euphemisms.” Maledicta 131: 63–72.
Harlan, Lindsey
1994 “Perfection and Devotion: Sati Tradition in Rajahstan.” In Sati, the Blessing and the Curse: The Burning of Wives in India, ed. by John Stratton Hawley, 79–90. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hart, David M.
2001 “Muslim Ritual Models in Two Pre-colonial Moroccan Berber Societies: Covenant, Conditional Curse, Shame Compulsion and Sacrifice.” The Journal of North American Studies 6 (2): 61–80.
Haugh, Michael
2016 “ ‘Just kidding’: Teasing and Claims to Non-Serious Intent.” Journal of Pragmatics 951: 120–136.
Haugh, Michael
2017 “Teasing.” In The Routledge Handbook of Language and Humor, ed. by Salvatore Attardo, 204–218. New York: Routledge.
2004 “An Oath, Its Curse and Anointing Ritual.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 124 (2): 315–321.
Kovai, Cecília
2002 “Az átokról: ‘Cigánybeszéd’ a gömbaljaiak között” [On Curse: Roma Talk in Gömbalja]. Tabula 5 (2): 272–290.
Kratz, Corinne A.
1989 “Genres of Power: A Comparative Analysis of Okiek Blessings, Curses and Oaths.” Man 241: 636–656.
Labov, William
1997 [1972] “Rules for Ritual Insults.” In Sociolinguistics: A Reader and Coursebook, ed. by Nikolas Coupland and Adam Jaworski, 472–486. London: MacMillan.
Letendre, Joan
2007 “ ‘Sugar and Spice but Not Always Nice’: Gender Socialization and Its Impact on Development and Maintenance of Aggression in Adolescent Girls.” Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal 24 (4): 353–368.
Levinson, Stephen C.
2003 “Contextualizing ‘Contextualization Cues’.” In Language and Interaction, ed. by Susan L. Eerdmans, Carlo L. Prevignano, and Paul Thibault, 32–39. Amsterdam, John Benjamins.
Matras, Yaron
2002Romani: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Muir, Edward
2005 [1997]Ritual in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Murano, Francesca
2012 “The Oscan Cursing Tablets: Binding Formulae, Cursing Typologies and Thematic Classification.” American Journal of Philology 133 (4): 629–655.
Pratt, Steven
1996 “Razzing: Ritualized Uses of Humour as a Form of Identification among American Indians.” In Interaction and Identity, ed. by Hartmut B. Mokros, 237–255. London: Transaction.
Ramos, Melissa
2015 “Spoken Word and Ritual Performance: The Oath and Curse in Deuteronomy 27–28.” Doctoral thesis, UCLA. Retrieved from: [URL]
1986 “Teasing and Shaming in Kaluli Children’s Interactions.” In Language Socialization across Cultures, ed. by Bambi B. Schieffelin and Elinor Ochs, 165–181. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Scotton-Myers, Carol
1988 “Code-Switching as Indexical of Social Negotiation.” In Codeswitching: Anthropological and Sociolinguistic Perspectives, ed. by Monica Heller, 151–186. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Silverstein, Michael
1993 “Metapragmatic Discourse and Metapragmatic Function.” In Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics, ed. by John Lucy, 33–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stewart, Michael S.
1997The Time of the Gypsies. Oxford: Westview Press.
Szalai, Andrea
2010 “Átok, feltételes átok és társadalmi nem erdélyi roma közösségek nyelvi ideológiájában és gyakorlataiban” [Curse, conditional curse and gender in language ideologies and practices of Transylvanian Roma communities]. PhD thesis, Pécs University.
Szalai, Andrea
2014 “Ideologies of Social Differentiation among Transylvanian Gabor Roma.” Acta Ethnographica Hungarica 59 (1): 85–112.
Terkourafi, Marina, and Dániel Z. Kádár
2017 “Convention and ritual”. In The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)Politess ed. by Jonathan Culpeper, Michael Haugh an Dániel Z. Kádár, 171–195. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Turner, Victor
1967The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Rituals. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Turner, Victor
1969The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. London: Transactions.
Turner, Victor
1979 “Frame, Flow and Reflection: Ritual and Drama as Public Liminality.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 6 (4): 465–499.
Vanci-Osam, Ülker
1998 “May You Be Shot with Greasy Bullets: Curse Utterances in Turkish.” Asian Folklore Studies 571: 71–86.
Wann, Daniel, and Len Zaichowsky
2009 “Sport Team Identification and Belief in Team Curses: The Case of the Boston Red Sox and the Curse of the Bambino.” Journal of Sport Behavior 32 (4): 489–502.
Watts, Richard J.
2003Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Weil, Shalva
1986 “The Language and Ritual of Socialisation: Birthday Parties in a Kindergarten Context.” Man 21 (2): 329–341.
Whutnow, Robert
1989Meaning and Order: Explorations in Cultural Analysis. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Cited by (6)
Cited by 6 other publications
Jia, Mian & Shuting Yao
2022. “Yo I am Superman, You Kiddo Go Home”: ritual impoliteness in Chinese freestyle rap battles. Text & Talk 42:5 ► pp. 691 ff.
Kontra, Miklós
2022. Hungarian Sociolinguistics in the Carpathian Basin, 1985–2022. Hungarian Studies Yearbook 4:1 ► pp. 33 ff.
2021. Sacred civility? An alternative conceptual architecture informed by cultural sociology. Journal of Politeness Research 17:1 ► pp. 9 ff.
Kádár, Dániel Z. & Juliane House
2021. Interaction Ritual and (Im)Politeness. Journal of Pragmatics 179 ► pp. 54 ff.
Kádár, Dániel Z., Vahid Parvaresh & Rosina Márquez Reiter
2021. Alternative Approaches to Politeness and Impoliteness: An Introduction. Journal of Politeness Research 17:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 july 2024. 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.