13. English- and Spanish-speaking teenagers’ use of rude vocatives
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Anna-Brita Stenström
Abstract
So far the description of teenagers’ linguistic habits has been restricted to Europe and the United States. This paper broadens the description by comparing the use of rude vocatives by teenage boys and girls in Latin-America (Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile) and Europe (London and Madrid) on the basis of four corpora of spontaneous conversation. The paper highlights that the teenagers use rude vocatives with no intention to insult but as intimacy-markers signalling social bonding. This is illustrated by extracts from the corpora, which also show that rude vocatives are more often used by the Spanish-speaking than by the English-speaking teenagers, and by the Latin-American teenagers in particular. Chilean huevón, for instance, is used so often that it is developing into a pragmatic marker, while the London teenagers use the neutral vocative tío/a for the same purpose. The rude vocatives are most often used by boys, above all the Spanish-speaking boys, with two notable exceptions: the girls’ boluda in Buenos Aires and gilipollas in London, which points to the ongoing linguistic levelling between the sexes, when it comes to the use of rude words. To end up, three words that have changed from extremely offensive vocatives to more or less accepted intensifiers are given special attention, notably motherfucker, cunt and coño.
Abstract
So far the description of teenagers’ linguistic habits has been restricted to Europe and the United States. This paper broadens the description by comparing the use of rude vocatives by teenage boys and girls in Latin-America (Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile) and Europe (London and Madrid) on the basis of four corpora of spontaneous conversation. The paper highlights that the teenagers use rude vocatives with no intention to insult but as intimacy-markers signalling social bonding. This is illustrated by extracts from the corpora, which also show that rude vocatives are more often used by the Spanish-speaking than by the English-speaking teenagers, and by the Latin-American teenagers in particular. Chilean huevón, for instance, is used so often that it is developing into a pragmatic marker, while the London teenagers use the neutral vocative tío/a for the same purpose. The rude vocatives are most often used by boys, above all the Spanish-speaking boys, with two notable exceptions: the girls’ boluda in Buenos Aires and gilipollas in London, which points to the ongoing linguistic levelling between the sexes, when it comes to the use of rude words. To end up, three words that have changed from extremely offensive vocatives to more or less accepted intensifiers are given special attention, notably motherfucker, cunt and coño.
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Contents V
- Foreword VII
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Part I: Othering and abjection as deep practice
- 1. “I will kill you today” – Reading “bad language” and swearing through Otherness, mimesis, abjection and camp 1
- 2. Ten issues facing taboo word scholars 37
- 3. “Damn your eyes!” (Not really): Imperative imprecatives, and curses as commands 53
- 4. “Oh, bald father!”: Kinship and swearing among Datooga of Tanzania 79
- 5. Aesthetics of the obscure: Swearing as horrible play 103
- 6. “I sh.t in your mouth”: Areal invectives in the Lower Volta Basin (West Africa) 121
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Part II: Cultural mobility as context of transgression
- 7. The linguistics of Jamaican swearing: Forms, background and adaptations 147
- 8. ‘Don’t say it in public’: Contestations and negotiations in northern Nigerian Muslim cyberspace 165
- 9. Mock Chinese in Kinshasa: On Lingala speakers’ offensive language use and verbal hostility 185
- 10. The name of the wild man: Colonial arbiru in East Timor 209
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Part III: Disruptive and trashy performance
- 11. Found and lost paradise: Bad language at a beach in Diani, Kenya 239
- 12. The sexy banana – artifacts of gendered language in tourism 259
- 13. English- and Spanish-speaking teenagers’ use of rude vocatives 281
- 14. “He shall not be buried in the West” – Cursing in Ancient Egypt 303
- Afterword 327
- Index 333
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Contents V
- Foreword VII
-
Part I: Othering and abjection as deep practice
- 1. “I will kill you today” – Reading “bad language” and swearing through Otherness, mimesis, abjection and camp 1
- 2. Ten issues facing taboo word scholars 37
- 3. “Damn your eyes!” (Not really): Imperative imprecatives, and curses as commands 53
- 4. “Oh, bald father!”: Kinship and swearing among Datooga of Tanzania 79
- 5. Aesthetics of the obscure: Swearing as horrible play 103
- 6. “I sh.t in your mouth”: Areal invectives in the Lower Volta Basin (West Africa) 121
-
Part II: Cultural mobility as context of transgression
- 7. The linguistics of Jamaican swearing: Forms, background and adaptations 147
- 8. ‘Don’t say it in public’: Contestations and negotiations in northern Nigerian Muslim cyberspace 165
- 9. Mock Chinese in Kinshasa: On Lingala speakers’ offensive language use and verbal hostility 185
- 10. The name of the wild man: Colonial arbiru in East Timor 209
-
Part III: Disruptive and trashy performance
- 11. Found and lost paradise: Bad language at a beach in Diani, Kenya 239
- 12. The sexy banana – artifacts of gendered language in tourism 259
- 13. English- and Spanish-speaking teenagers’ use of rude vocatives 281
- 14. “He shall not be buried in the West” – Cursing in Ancient Egypt 303
- Afterword 327
- Index 333
