by Emma Byrne
When she showed the pictures to a group of sixty-four people who spoke French as a first language and had learned English as adults, the answers given in French were much more concerned with trying to be independent—a very adolescent preoccupation—whereas the descriptions they gave in English were more focused on achievement.6 In a similar experiment with another group, when she showed a picture of a woman sitting on the floor with her head resting on the sofa to an American man who had been sent to a boarding school in Japan between the ages of eight and fourteen, she found that “in Japanese he suggested that it was a woman weeping over her lost fiancé and considering suicide, while in English he said that the picture depicted a girl finishing a project for a sewing class.” This pattern was repeated over and over. When asked to describe a scene in Japanese, his answers were emotionally rich and dealt with themes such as loss and family. His answers in English, on the other hand, were much more impersonal. Japanese women living in San Francisco were also more likely to give very different answers when asked to complete sentences like “I will probably become . . .” When interviewed in English, their answers were more likely to include careers (“a teacher” for example) whereas in Japanese they were more likely to say they would become mothers or housewives.7
Dr. Ervin-Tripp suggests that the psychological development we experience at the same time that we are learning a language becomes bound up in that language to some degree, and that part of our personality predominates as soon as we switch languages. For her volunteer, all the time that he was away from his family, and developing into puberty, he was communicating predominantly in Japanese. As he learned to process feelings of attachment and loss, he was also learning to express himself in Japanese, but these weren’t feelings he had experienced to the same degree when he spoke English. For the rest of his life he could much more easily access these strong emotions in Japanese than English. The same is true for us all: as our emotional selves are developing, well into adolescence, we easily internalize emotional as well as literal meaning.
It’s much harder for adults to internalize the emotional meaning of the words, but not impossible, especially in early adulthood as we’re experiencing new challenges for the first time. Most of us are still learning how to respond to certain situations such as opening a bank account, renting a flat, or managing our finances well into early adulthood. As in childhood and adolescence, feelings experienced for the first time tend to become most closely linked with the language we are speaking at that stage in our lives. For example, “Johanna” is English but spent her young adulthood in Italy. “I’m more likely to express anger in Italian. Mainly because I’ve only really learned how to in the last few years and since I’ve spent my young adulthood here I’ve gotten more practice raging at the government or the landlord in my adopted language. I still end up feeling ridiculous when I get worked up about things in English.”8
We know that this is generally the case thanks to an ingenious experiment by Professor Jeanette Altarriba from the State University of New York at Albany. She has spent many years studying the interaction between emotion and second languages using a variant of the Stroop test, the same one that was used to test Tourette’s syndrome sufferers and their impulse control in chapter 3. In its original form the Stroop test tries to “trick” you into saying the written word rather than the ink color (here). The amount of time it takes to overcome the urge to give the correct-but-difficult answer rather than the wrong-but-automatic answer is a good measure of how hard you find it to inhibit unhelpful impulses. The test has been used to check for the effects of everything from aging to happiness to sleep deprivation.
But there’s another way of using variants of the Stroop test. Rather than discovering how hard it is to overcome inhibition, we can use it to probe for incongruity. We know that people find incongruent stimuli much more challenging than congruent ones: it’s easier to say “pink” if pink is both the color that is written and the ink that it is written in.
Professor Altarriba used a variant of the Stroop test as a probe to see how much emotion was packed into words in both a first and second language by testing for congruence between the emotion of the sentence and the words “positive” and “negative.”9 She showed volunteers words on a screen and asked them to say “positive” if the word they read was a noun and “negative” if it was an adjective. The words “positive” and “negative” were, in this case, acting like the color of the ink in the traditional Stroop test. However, some of those nouns and adjectives had positive emotional associations (“friend,” “happy”) while some were negative (“enemy,” “angry”). Those associations act like the printed name of the color in the original Stroop test: the volunteers had to ignore the automatic associations in order to give the correct answer to the question “Is this a noun?”
Try it for yourself: how easy is it to answer “positive” for a noun and “negative” for an adjective with the following examples?
1. Joyful
2. Death
3. Fear
4. Beautiful
5. Sad
6. Treat
7. Fun
8. Frightening
The answers you should have given were 1) negative 2) positive 3) positive 4) negative 5) negative 6) positive 7) positive 8) negative. You probably found the second set of four words easier to classify than the first set of four. That’s because we have to work much harder to say “positive” when we read a word like “death,” which makes us feel decidedly negative.
Professor Altarriba carried out a detailed version of a similar experiment with some of her students. The thirty-two volunteers were bilinguals who spoke Spanish as a first language, but who had been educated in English-speaking schools. Although Spanish was their mother tongue, these students were as close to truly bilingual as it is possible to be. Professor Altarriba found that, whether words were in English or Spanish, these volunteers found it easier to answer correctly when words were congruent (i.e., the noun “friend” demanding the response “positive” and the adjective “angry” demanding the response “negative”) than when they were incongruent (i.e., the noun “death” demanding the response “positive” and the adjective “happy” demanding the response “negative”).
The fact that the incongruent stimuli (emotionally negative nouns and emotionally positive adjectives) were much harder to process than the congruent ones means that the volunteers must have been feeling the emotional effect of the words strongly enough for it to interfere with the task of categorizing the words into nouns and adjectives. There would be no incongruity between how the word “death” makes you feel and the required answer (“positive”) unless you’d internalized the emotional impact of that word.
But Professor Altarriba’s students were unusual; very few of us are skilled enough to speak two languages with such fluency. Does the same effect hold for all second-language speakers? Professors Ayçiçeği and Harris, the ones who made graduate students tremble by playing childhood reprimands at them, somehow persuaded the same group of volunteers to try another language task, this time to do with memory.10 Remember that these native Turkish speakers lived and worked in Boston but had not learned English until they got to the age of twelve. In the experiment they were shown lists of words that included taboo words in English or Turkish like “asshole,” “whore,” “shit,” and “sevis¸mek” (“fuck”), “kahpe” (“bitch”), “fuhus¸” (“prostitution”). The list also included negative words such as “katletmek” (“murder”); positive words such as “gülmek” (“laugh”); neutral words such as “masa” (“table”); and those childhood reprimands again, such as “Seni utanmaz!” (“Shame on you!”).
Professors Ayçiçeği and Harris told another of those little white lies that make psychology experiments possible. Before the experiment, they told the volunteers that they were being asked to rate the words from one to seven depending on how positive or negative they found them to be, but this isn’t what they really wanted t
o test. After the “experiment” the true test began: they asked half of the volunteers to write down as many words as they could remember and asked the other half to circle the words that they had seen from a list of 128. None of the volunteers knew they would be quizzed beforehand and so hadn’t been primed to make a special effort to remember the words.
The volunteers found it much harder to remember “bad” words in Turkish than they did in English. Even though these words were more familiar to them, being part of their mother tongue, the taboo words that made the volunteers feel bad were the words that were most easily forgotten. Taboo, negative, and scolding words were all more easily recalled when seen in English than when seen in Turkish, while there was no difference between the positive and neutral terms. Professor Ayçiçeği calls this an “emotional advantage” in the speakers’ second language. Reprimands, taboos, and negative terms were far less hurtful in the second language and so were less likely to be deliberately forgotten.
That emotional advantage can stretch to finding greater self-expression in a second language, even if we are not as familiar with it. Sometimes we need to be able to express ourselves without being overwhelmed with feelings. “Some bilingual writers may prefer to write in a ‘stepmother tongue,’ escaping the emotional overcharge and traumatising powers of the mother tongue,” says linguist Steven Kellman.11 This is borne out by the experience of many of the multilinguals that Professor Dewaele has studied, who say that swearing is actually easier in their second language. While they might be more fluent in their first language, the emotional impact is far less in their second, particularly if they internalized very strong taboos while growing up.12 For example, Nicole (a pseudonym) who speaks English as a first language, followed by German, French, Italian, and Spanish, told Professor Dewaele: “My parents were quite strict and I still have the phrase ‘I’ll wash your mouth out with soap and water’ in my head! I’d never swear in English, but it’s easier in German.” Likewise, Maria, whose mother tongue is Spanish says, “I never swear in Spanish. I simply cannot. The words are too heavy and are truly a taboo for me.”
Of course, sticking to your own language, especially if it’s a rare one, can also give you the freedom to swear without getting into trouble. Didi, who speaks Sundanese, Bahsa Indo, and English, says that Sundanese has huge advantages as a language for swearing in. Not only does it feel strongest, as his mother tongue, it’s also not very widely known, even in London. “I [swore at] somebody near Birkbeck College in 1997 using Sundanese while the person is English—it is . . . safer for me to do this.”
How Universal Are Swear Words?
According to Professor Dewaele’s studies, most of us do tend to stick to our first language when we swear. It not only feels more effective (and gives us a veneer of safety if we think we won’t be understood) but also is the one we feel most emotionally competent in. “Language users seem to avoid use of linguistic nuclear devices if they are unsure about the yield,” he says.13
Why can’t we just translate the emotional intensity of a swear word in one language to another? Why are some swear words so much more offensive in some languages than others? To answer that, we need to look at how swear words have evolved in different languages.
Sometimes it’s simply the case that one language has words that do a better job of expressing our emotions than another. Whether it’s the wide range of Spanish swear words that had to be called in to replace a volley of ever-adaptable English “fucks” in the translation of Pulp Fiction, or something far more affectionate like the use of “cariño,” which means tender, affectionate love in Spanish but has no direct English equivalent.
The experience of strong emotions—joy, pain, anger, fear—is shared by all humanity, regardless of our individual linguistic backgrounds. As a result, every culture needs strong words to express strong feelings. Likewise, every culture has taboos and these taboos make their way into the set of words that is considered “bad language.” So far, so universal. But it isn’t possible simply to substitute swear words from one language to another because the power of swearing is determined by culture: what is a mild reference in one language or culture might be the nuclear option in another. As Sandra, who is bilingual in German and Italian, says in one of Professor Dewaele’s studies: “Swearing in Italian means talking about God, Maria etc., in an obscene way, which in German doesn’t mean a thing. The other way round in German you might use animals’ names to insult a person. In Italian it wouldn’t mean anything.”
When learning a second language it can be very hard to pick up the best way of insulting or amusing someone. It’s not simply a matter of having to be mindful of the emotional effects of language, it’s often the case that we don’t know the “right” words. What seems like a deadly insult at home might be totally ineffective in another country. Take this example from Professor Dewaele:
“Insults and [swearing] are highly culture-specific, as was highlighted again in March 2003 in the bitter verbal exchange between a Kuwaiti diplomat and an Iraqi minister where their respective mustaches became the target of insults. What is laughable in one culture might be deeply offensive in another.”14
Even speakers of ostensibly the same language might use very different types of swearing.15 For example, the difference between French that is spoken in France and French that is spoken in Canada is huge, especially when it comes to swearing and taboo words. French Canadians are much more likely to violate religious taboos when they want to swear. In French-speaking Canada, words like “hostie” (“host”) and “vierge” (“virgin”) are offensive: “hostie de voisin” is insulting in Quebec but meaningless in Lyon, where “salaud de voisin” (“bastard neighbor”) would be a much more likely choice to convey the same sentiment.
Even in the same country, different regions, classes, and social groups have different types of swearing. In chapter 6, on gender and swearing, we saw how differently working-class women in the north of England use swearing (plenty of sexual taboos but very little blasphemy, used to send strong social signals about their independence, here) compared to young women at college in the United States (lots of mild swearing, used to send strong social signals about acceptance, here). There has been no comprehensive census of swearing in every language, but we do know that they all include taboo words, and that those taboos vary both from place to place and over time.
“You taught me language; and my profit on’t is, I know how to curse.”
We tend not to be taught bad language in “formal” language lessons and so we end up acquiring it elsewhere: from books, films, the internet, friends. There are even speciality language guides, like The Complete Merde! by the pseudonymous “Geneviève,” which translates swearing, cursing, and slang for the speaker of French as a second language, with phrases like “Je m’en fous” (“I don’t give a fuck”) and “Il m’emmerde” (he annoys me—literally “He gives me shit”).
But the problem with swearing dictionaries is that they lack context. Swearing packs an emotional punch. The reason—we are told—that we aren’t taught to swear in school is that there is always a “clean” alternative. But who seriously believes that “this is bad” and “this is shit” are remotely synonymous?
Given the huge differences in the cultural meaning of swearing between different languages, surely it’s more important to help users understand not only the literal but also the emotional and figurative meanings of swearing so that they don’t make calamitous mistakes when trying to shift their swearing from one language to another?
Some language teachers, especially in secondary schools, are happy to turn the students’ fascination with taboos to their advantage. An example from a study by Professor Monika Maria Chavez of the University of Wisconsin–Madison shows a teaching assistant (TA) encouraging his students to use insulting, joking, and informal language when talking to him.16 His pupils take part in jocular abuse between themselves, and also jocular abuse of the TA:
FIRST STUDENT: Du bist ein lus
tiger Mann. Deine schmutzige Kleidung war fantastisch. Kennst du Deine[sic] Tag mit keine [sic] Kreide an deine [sic] blaue [sic] Hose? (You are a funny man. Your dirty clothes are wild. Do you know one single day without chalk on your blue pants [jeans]?)
SECOND STUDENT: Dein grüner Hut ist super sexy. (Your green hat is super sexy.)
THIRD STUDENT: Du bist ein lustiger, verrückter TA, aber auch ein später TA. (You are a funny, crazy TA but also a late TA.)
TEACHER: Nur, nur wegen . . . den Scheißbussen na! (Only, only because . . . of the shit buses!)
This TA says that he wants the students to get a feel for the real language, which is why he uses what he considers to be real terms. By insisting that students use German to say the sorts of things that adolescent students say about their teachers—and by “rewarding” with some swearing in turn—he is encouraging them to use German as an instrument of self-expression, rather than teaching the language formally. But there is a difficulty here; many teachers feel uncomfortable with the idea of talking about the kinds of taboos that underpin swearing with their pupils, particularly on topics such as sex or race.
“These are difficult ethical questions. Just how much emotion-laden vocabulary and expressions should be taught to the learners? Should these words and expressions include the many synonyms referring to sexual anatomy and sexual behavior? What about words with racist connotations?” asks Professor Dewaele.17
According to linguist Robin-Eliece Mercury we risk doing students a great disservice unless we research ways of including swearing when we teach foreign languages.18 Students are going to be exposed to swearing, cursing, and insults anyway through popular culture and through their friends, so surely it’s better, she maintains, for them to learn how to swear responsibly? The problem is that there is very little research into how best to teach second-language learners about swearing. Ms. Mercury found herself unprepared when a student came to her to ask about swearing:
