RU | EN
Submenu

Pallades V. Assessing the Admissibility of Arabic Swearwords in Sudanese Linguistic Culture

V. Pallades
PhD, Senior Lecturer, St. Petersburg State University
St. Petersburg, Russia
ORCID: 0000-0002-0588-2538
E-mail: palaver@zohomail.com

 

 Download  |  Go to Issue #1. 2025

 

ABSTRACT. In terms of ethnic and cultural identity, Sudan is frequently grouped together with other Arab countries. Yet, Sudan is a highly distinctive civilization, with cultural values and traditions that often diverge significantly from those of the general Arab world. This makes studies based on Sudanese linguistic culture particularly worthwhile. The paper addresses the problems associated with determining levels of offensiveness (based on the Arabic within the Sudanese linguistic culture). As the direct determination of word offensiveness remains a challenging task, this study aims to assess the potential for some Arabic lexemes by determining their admissibility for males and females in a particular dialect. To achieve this objective, a survey was conducted among native speakers of Sudanese Arabic. The initial selection of 15 swear words was then subjected to an examination to determine their admissibility for different communicators in three communicative situations. The findings of the study demonstrated that in Sudanese Arabic linguoculture, there is a significant difference in the perceptions of acceptability of the same word by men and women, and this discrepancy has the potential to serve as a conflictogenic factor. In addition to the significance of invective research, the study indicated that a larger scale of research would necessitate the utilization of more effective methods.

 

KEYWORDS: invective, swearwords, offensiveness, admissibility, Arabic, Sudanese, taboo

 

DOI 10.31250/2618-8600-2025-1(27)-218-235
UDC 82- 655:811.411.21

 

REFERENCES

  • Abdel-Raheem A. Taboo metaphtonymy, gender, and impoliteness: how male and female Arabcartoonists think and draw. Social Semiotics, 2022, vol. 34, iss. 3, pp. 331–367. (In English).
  • Al-Harahsheh A. M. A. Language and Gender Differences in Jordanian Spoken Arabic: A Sociolinguistics Perspective. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 2014, vol. 4, no. 5, pp. 872–882. (In English).
  • Al‐Khatib M. A. A sociolinguistic view of linguistic taboo in Jordanian Arabic. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 1995, vol. 16, iss. 6, pp. 443–457. (In English).
  • Al-Wer E. Language and Gender in the Middle East and North Africa. The Handbook of Language, Gender, and Sexuality. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2014, pp. 396–411. (In English).
  • Allen K., Burridge K. Forbidden words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 303 p. (In English).
  • Almathkuri J. Influence of Social Power and Distance on Request Strategies in Saudi Arabic. International Journal of Linguistics, 2021, vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 95–109. (In English).
  • Attitudes to potentially offensive language and gestures on TV and radio. Research report. Ofcom, 2016. Available at: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0022/91624/OfcomOffensiveLanguage.pdf (accessed: 10.06.2024). (In English).
  • Bailey L. A., Timm L. A. More on Women’s — and Men’s — Expletives. Anthropological Linguistics, 1976, vol. 18, no. 9, pp. 438–449. (In English).
  • Davidson T., Warmsley D., Macy M., Weber I. Automated hate speech detection and the problem of offensive language. Proceedings of the Eleventh International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 2017, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 512–515. (In English).
  • Dewaele J.-M. The Emotional Force of Swearwords and Taboo Words in the Speech of Multilinguals. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 2004, vol. 25, iss. 2–3, pp. 204–222. (In English).
  • Eckert P., McConnell-Ginet S. Language and Gender. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 366 p. (In English).
  • Feinberg J. Obscene Words and the Law. Law and Philosophy, 1983, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 139–161. (In English).
  • Founta A.-M., Djouvas C., Chatzakou D., Leontiadis I., Blackburn J., Stringhini G., Vakali A., Sirivianos M., Kourtellis N. Large scale crowdsourcing and characterization of twitter abusive behavior. Proceedings of the Twelfth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 2018, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 491–500. (In English).
  • Golev N. D. [Juridical aspect of language in legal coverage]. Yurislingvistika-1: Problemy i Perspektivy: Mezhvuzovskiy sbornik nauchnykh trudov [Legal Linguistics-1: problems andprospects: Interuniversity collection of scientific papers]. Barnaul: Izdatel’stvo Altayskogo gosudarstvennogouniversiteta Publ., 1999, pp. 11–57. (In Russian).
  • Hada R., Sudhir S., Mishra P., Yannakoudakis H., Mohammad S., Shutova E. Ruddit: Norms of Offensiveness for English Reddit Comments. Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, 2021, vol. 1, pp. 2700–2717. (In English).
  • Hall K., Borba R., Hiramoto M. Language and Gender. The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2021, pp. 892–912. (In English).
  • Holmes J. Sex differences and miscommunication: Some data from New Zealand. Crosscultural encounters: Communication and miscommunication. Melbourne: River Seine, 1985,pp. 24–43. (In English).
  • Holmes J. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. London: Routledge, 2013, 512 p. (In English).
  • Hughes G. An Encyclopedia of Swearing. The Social History of Oaths, Profanity, Foul Language and Ethnic Slurs in English-Speaking World. New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2006, 573 p.(In English).
  • Izotova T. M., Kuznetsov V. O., Plotnikova A. M. [Methodology of forensic linguistic analysis in criminal insult investigations]. Teoriya i praktika sudebnoy ekspertizy [Theory and Practice of Forensic Science], 2016, no. 1 (41), pp. 92–98. (In Russian).
  • Jay T., Janschewitz K. The pragmatics of swearing. Journal of Politeness Research, 2008, vol. 4, iss. 2, pp. 267–288. (In English).
  • Kiritchenko S., Mohammad S. Best-worst scaling more reliable than rating scales: A case study on sentiment intensity annotation. Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Vancouver: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2017, vol. 2, pp. 465–470. (In English).
  • Klerk V. D. Expletives: men only? Communications Monographs, 1991, vol. 58, iss. 2, pp. 156–169. (In English).
  • Kuznetsov A. M., Burdin L. S., Solntseva N. V. Yurislingvistika (yazyk i parvo): nauchno-analiticheskiy obzor [Juridical linguistics (Language and law): scientific analytical review].Moscow: INION RAN Publ., 2006, 69 p. (In Russian).
  • Lakoff R. Language and Woman’s Place. Language in Society, 1973, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 45–80. (In English).
  • Legroski M. Offensiveness scale: how offensive is this expression? Estudos Linguísticos, 2018, vol. 47, no. 1, pp. 169–180. (In Portuguese).
  • Liu C. The Derogatory Force and the Offensiveness of Slurs. Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu, 2021, vol. 28, no. 3, pp. 626–649. (In English).
  • Ljung M. Swearing. A Cross-Cultural Linguistic Study. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 190 p. (In English).
  • Louviere J. J., Flynn T. N., Marley A. A. J. Best-Worst Scaling: Theory, Methods and Applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, 342 p. (In English).
  • McEnery T. Swearing in English. Bad Language, Purity and Power from 1586 to the Present. London: Routledge, 2006, 248 p. (In English).
  • Pallades V. V. [Taboo Words as a Component of Invective Vocabulary and Their Determining in Arabic against the Background of Russian and English Languages]. Vestnik Sankt-Peterburgskogo universiteta. Vostokovedeniye i afrikanistika [Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. Asian and African Studies], 2022, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 299–319. (In Russian).
  • Qanbar N. Y. A Sociolinguistic Study of the Linguistic Taboos in the Yemeni Society. Modern Journal of Applied Linguistics, 2011, no. 3, pp. 86–104. (In English).
  • Salih A. M. Taboo Words and Euphemism in English and Arabic: A Contrastive Study: PhD diss. Pune: Institute of Advanced Studies in English, 2013, 267 p. (In English).
  • Salih A. M., Raoof M. O. Human-Qualities Swear Words in English and Iraqi Arabic: A Sociolinguistic Study. Journal of Tikrit University for Humanities, 2022, vol. 29, iss. 8, pt. 2, pp. 1–23. (In English).
  • Waseem Z., Hovy D. Hateful symbols or hateful people? Predictive features for hate speech detection on twitter. Proceedings of the NAACL Student Research Workshop. San Diego: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2016, pp. 88–93. (In English).
  • What not to swear: The Acceptability of Words in Broadcasting. Broadcasting Standards Authority. 2009, 44 p. Available at: https://www.bsa.govt.nz/oldsite/assets/Research/What-Notto-Swear-Full-BSA2010.pdf (accessed: 10.06.2024). (In English).