Damn Vs Darn: Researchers Find Commonality In Swear Words Across Languages

Swear words seem to have a certain punch to them, but is there a specific commonality among them across different languages? These words actually tend to lack certain letters, a pair of researchers has found.

For their study, published this week in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, researchers Shiri Lev-Ari and Ryan McKay of Royal Holloway, University of London took a closer look at the sounds of profanity across languages.

Swear words have distinct sounds that are "especially fit for purpose," they said, and these facilitate the "expression of emotion and attitude."

"To date, however, there has been no systematic cross-linguistic investigation of phonetic patterns in profanity," they wrote. "Here we investigate whether speakers of disparate languages deem certain sounds to be better at expressing profanity than others."

For their work, the researchers conducted a set of studies.

In their pilot study, they recruited speakers of five distant languages (Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Korean and Russian), and asked them to provide "the most vulgar words" in their own languages.

Here, they found that the swear words were less likely to contain approximants, publishing company Springer noted in a news release. Approximant letters include the ones with sonorous sounds, such as l, r, w and y.

Then in Study 1, they recruited more than 200 native speakers of six different languages (Arabic, Chinese, Finnish, French, German and Spanish) for the test they called "How Good Is Your 'Sweardar'?"

In it, the participants had to identify the swear word between two words they hear in a different language. However, both words in the pair were actually pseudo-words based on existing words, except one of them contained an approximant, while the other had an affricate such as ts, ch or j.

For instance, they modified the Albanian word "zog," which means bird, to "yog" with the approximant y, and "tsog" without it, Springer noted.

The participants heard 80 pairs of unfamiliar words. Interestingly, they were also "significantly less likely" to choose the words with approximants as swear words. This held true even for the French speakers, whose language is "rich" with swear words containing an approximant, the researchers said.

For Study 2 of their work, the researchers had a look at "minced oaths," which are essentially the "sanitized versions" of swear words. For instance, the word "damn," when sanitized, becomes "darn."

Looking at the minced words in the Oxford English Dictionary as well as the ones listed on Wikipedia, they found that the minced oaths had approximants more frequently than the original swear words.

Overall, this indicates that "not all sounds are equally suitable for profanity," the researchers said.

"Our findings suggest that approximants are a relevant 'restraint' — the verbal equivalent of fitting a compressed air hinge to a door," they wrote.

This, they clarified, doesn't mean that having an approximant automatically removes the offense from a word. However, the findings shed light on an underlying cognitive bias in how swear words may have evolved across cultures.

"So, are swear words 'universally patterned on the basis of sound'? Our results point to a robust cross-linguistic sound symbolic association in the minds of human speakers," they wrote.