When it comes to swearing, women set tongues wagging
Australian linguistics experts point to language on the TV and radio becoming more informal
By Beau Donelly
You wouldn’t effing believe it, but women now swear more than men.
That’s the finding of a survey tracking the swearing habits of hundreds of people whose daily conversations were recorded and analysed over the past two decades.
The research found that in the early 1990s men said f--k 1000 times per million words, compared to just 167 times for women. But the preliminary results of the latest survey reveal men’s use of the expletive has dropped to 540 times, while women now break out the f-bomb 546 times per million words.
The full results of the Economic and Social Research Council survey in the UK will not be available until 2018, but Australian linguistics expert Kate Burridge said they would likely show a similar trend because swearing had become more accepted in society.
“What ‘nice’ girls say today is very different from what ‘nice’ girls used to say,” the professor at Melbourne’s Monash University professor.
“There have been massive social changes that mean we’re getting informal language in the public much more than before. It’s been on the increase since the 1990s, especially on TV and radio.”