Ah, the power of swear words. Whether you curse like a sailor or never use foul language, we all know a swear word when we hear it. They have a special ability to convey one’s emotion with particular emphasis—whether grief, pain, anger, fear, desire, joy, or surprise. Sometimes, the most reasonable emotional reaction is a string of obscenities. As Mark Twain said, “Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.”

So what is it about swear words that make them so offensive and highly useful in certain contexts? It has been suggested that harsh, abrasive sounds are particularly salient in swear words, and those sounds perhaps give the words an extra jolt. If that is the case, then these kinds of sounds should appear in swear words across the world—regardless of the language. To date, there has not been a cross-linguistic study on the sound patterns in swear words… until now, which is surprising given that profanity has colored our tongues for hundreds of years. Shiri Lev-Ari and Ryan McKay have conducted a new study that will be published in Psychonomic Society journal Psychonomic Bulletin and Review.

Sound Symbolism

Sound symbolism occurs when speech sounds (phonemes) have a connection to the meaning of a word. Lev-Ari and McKay use the example that words relating to the nose often use the sound n in many languages. This also extends to examples of onomatopoeia, like boom, splat, click, and whir. Sound symbolism can be broadened to categories of phonemes, such as:

Plosives: p, t, k, b, d, g

Fricatives: f, v, s, z, th, sh

Affricates: j, ch, ts

Approximants: l, r, w, y

There have been a number of studies that have shown associations between phonemic categories and swear words. Here are a few notable patterns:

• Swear words are rich in plosives
• Words seem more arousing and negative if they have short vowels, voiceless consonants, and plosives
• Words with plosives and affricates are considered more taboo and better for taboo compounding (covered in this Psychonomic Society blogpost)

Therefore, as a substitute to swearing, you could potentially get the same point across by spouting out a series of plosives, fricatives, and affricates—like Joe Pesci in the holiday family favorite Home Alone:

As a first step to compare sound symbolism in expletives across languages, Lev-Ari and McKay compared the most vulgar words in Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Korean, and Russian (very linguistically different tongues). In this pilot study, they analyzed the frequency of each phonemic group in swear words versus control words, and approximants appeared less frequently in swear words compared to other phonemic groups overall. Anecdotally, as I sit here thinking through all the dirty words I know in English, I’d have to agree that approximants are difficult to find among them.

How’s your Sweardar?

If swear words have similar sound symbolism in different languages, then non-native listeners may be able to recognize a swear word in a foreign language. In one study by Lev-Ari and McKay, they recruited listeners who were native in Arabic, Chinese, Finnish, French, German, and Spanish. Listeners heard word pairs in 20 foreign languages, and they had to identify which word was the swear. (This study is so cool they should make it a BuzzFeed quiz. It would go viral.)

Little did the listeners know, the word pairs weren’t words at all—they were pseudo-words based on existing words in the 20 languages. The pairs differed in that one had an approximant and the other had an affricate. In the earlier pilot study, the authors found that affricates did not have a special association with swear words, so they were a good neutral phonemic group for this task.

Across the board, listeners were less likely to judge the approximant words to be swear words. Affricates were selected as more swear-like in 63% of trials. This was even true for French speakers, who do use approximants in their swears (e.g., salaud, connard, merde, enculé de ta mere). This suggests that people have a basic idea of what sounds taboo without knowing the language.

Watch your mouth!

A common way to substitute an expletive in polite company is to use a minced oath. Minced oaths take an offensive word, and change one or more phonemes to magically make it inoffensive (as in changing f^cking to frigging or damn to darn). They give you that good, clean feeling … like Orbit gum:

In another study, Lev-Ari and McKay analyzed how people mince their oaths. They gathered all the minced oaths they could find in English using the Oxford English Dictionary and the Wikipedia page on the subject. They compiled a list of 67 altered versions of 24 swear words. In their analysis, they found that approximants were more common in minced oaths than legitimate swears, indicating that we soften our language by inserting an approximant.

This series of new findings by Lev-Ari and McKay demonstrate that all phonemes are NOT created equal, and not all are appropriate for swearing. Approximants (such as l, r, w, y) are often perceived as calming and gentle; they are the consonants of the peace-keepers, the music-makers, the dreamers of dreams. If only people used them more, we would all sound a lot friggin’ nicer to each other.

Psychonomic Society article featured in this post:

Lev-Ari, S. & McKay, R. (2022). The sound of swearing: Are there universal patterns in profanity? Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-022-02202-0