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Swearing in a second language: the role of emotions and perceptions

ABSTRACT The present study argues that the speech behaviour of swearing in bilingual speakers is more complex and nuanced than it has been previously assumed. Second language users acquire swearwords as an unconscious ingroup social strategy or as a mechanism for second language identity construction. Swearing is a complex sociolinguistic practice and is driven, in part, by the type of emotion that is evoked in the communicative context. Using web-based emotion evoking video scenarios, the present study elicited linguistic data from 34 speakers of English as a second language, with Persian, Arabic, Spanish, and Portuguese as the first languages. Participants viewed 14 mute, multi-second visual scenarios that displayed either a high-arousing or a low-arousing emotional situation. Participants then answered questions about each scenario in both English and their first language. The results revealed that utterances produced in response to high-arousing emotional scenarios contained swearing in both English and the respondents’ first languages, while scenarios that evoked low-arousing emotions resulted in a significant general preference for swearing in English. The frequency of swearing in the first language significantly reduced in response to low-arousing emotional situations mainly through replacing swearwords with interjections. The role of heuristic-systematic information processing will be further discussed.