The sound of taboo: investigating a sound-symbolic association in taboo words of English and French

Abstract

Taboo words, also known as swear words, curse words, profanities, etc., are words socially forbidden because they are considered as extremely impolite and/or profoundly insulting. These include rude words – known as gros mots (literally “big/rude words”) in French – related to taboo domains (religion, sexuality, body waste) on the one hand, and bigoted words known as slurs on the other hand – those two subcategories overlap with slurs related to sexuality, e.g. faggot or whore. Compared to the rest of the English or French lexicon, taboo words tend to contain significantly more of the least sonorant consonants, i.e. /p/, /t/, /k/, /tʃ/, /f/, /s/, /ʃ/, /θ/, /h/, /b/, /d/, /g/ or /dʒ/ (p<0.01). How can we explain this observation? Sound symbolism, the notion that sounds may have a meaning (Haiman 2018: 118-119) gives us a possible explanation. There may be an unconscious form-meaning association in the mind of speakers (Bergen 2016: 52-63) between non-sonorant consonants on the one hand, and some common meaning shared by taboo words on the other hand. This meaning is probably not semantic, but rather pragmatic and emotional (Finkelstein 2018: 311, 326), and the association may be iconic: non-sonorant consonants may be iconically appropriate to express the contextual meaning of ""violation of the hearer's personal space"" (Haiman 2018: 39-59), or the emotion of aggressiveness (Yardy 2010: 12-20; 71-78) – hence this creates a selection bias towards words with such consonants, when speaker communities choose which words they forbid. The study of fictional taboo words from English- and French-speaking works of fiction can give us circumstantial evidence: data gathered from a variety of English-speaking films, comic books, novels, and from French-speaking comic books The Adventures of Tintin by Hergé, show a similar tendency to contain more sonorant consonants compared to the regular lexicon (p<0.05 for English, p<0.06 for French). We will present a more systematic, experimental protocol to gather similar data on fictional taboo words: we will prompt English- and French-speaking respondents to playfully invent fictional swear words – and filler words; more precisely, alien/extra-terrestrial swear words, in order to remove as much as possible the influence of real-life taboo words – because some respondents might think, even unconsciously, that a convincing fictional swear word has to be related to and/or sound like some real-life swear word. If these invented words did follow the same phonological tendency, this would give another empirical confirmation of the hypothesised, sound-symbolic association. This suggests that a strong, persistent, conscious sociolinguistic convention (which words are taboo and which are not) can be influenced by an unconscious form-meaning association. Moreover, it suggests that sounds may convey meaning and emotion even in the seemingly least poetic words of the lexicon. We will conclude with theoretical considerations on the numerous social implications of this, especially in relation to social class – politeness vs. impoliteness, and the use of swear words are typically influenced by social class – and domination – what does this tell us about slurs and the proposed alternatives to slurs? Can we use this knowledge to prevent or limit the harm done to the dominated groups that are targeted by slurs?