Language and Literature

ARTICLE
Language and Literature Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications
(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), Vol 13(3): 235–268
DOI: 10.1177/0963947004044873 www.sagepublications.com
Swearing in modern British English: the case of fuck in
the BNC
Anthony McEnery and Zhonghua Xiao, Lancaster University, UK
Abstract
Swearing is a part of everyday language use. To date it has been infrequently studied,
though some recent work on swearing in American English, Australian English and
British English has addressed the topic. Nonetheless, there is still no systematic account
of swear-words in English. In terms of approaches, swearing has been approached from
the points of view of history, lexicography, psycholinguistics and semantics. There have
been few studies of swearing based on sociolinguistic variables such as gender, age and
social class. Such a study has been difficult in the absence of corpus resources. With the
production of the British National Corpus (BNC), a 100,000,000-word balanced corpus
of modern British English, such a study became possible. In addition to parts of speech,
the corpus is richly annotated with metadata pertaining to demographic features such as
age, gender and social class, and textual features such as register, publication medium
and domain. While bad language may be related to religion (e.g. Jesus, heaven, hell and
damn), sex (e.g. fuck), racism (e.g. nigger), defecation (e.g. shit), homophobia (e.g.
queer) and other matters, we will, in this article, examine only the pattern of uses of
fuck and its morphological variants, because this is a typical swear-word that occurs
frequently in the BNC. This article will build and expand upon the examination of fuck
by McEnery et al. (2000) by examining the distribution pattern of fuck within and
across spoken and written registers.
Keywords: BNC; corpus; fuck; sociolinguistic variable; swear
1 Introduction
Swearing is a part of everyday language use. To date it has been infrequently
studied, though some recent work on swearing in American English (e.g. Jay,
1992), Australian English (e.g. Kidman, 1993) and British English (e.g. McEnery
et al., 2000) has addressed the topic. Nonetheless, there is still no systematic
account of swear-words in English.1 In terms of approaches, swearing has been
approached from the points of view of history (e.g. Montagu, 1973[1967];
Hughes, 1991), lexicography (Sheidlower, 1995), psycholinguistics (e.g. Jay,
1992) and semantics (Kidman, 1993). There have been few studies of swearing
based on sociolinguistic variables such as gender, age and social class.2 Such a
study has been difficult in the absence of corpus resources. With the production of
the British National Corpus (BNC), a 100,000,000-word balanced corpus of
modern British English,3 such a study became possible. In addition to parts of
speech, the corpus is richly annotated with metadata pertaining to demographic
features such as age, gender and social class, and textual features such as register