It's hard to curse with soft sounds .
Why do swear words sound vulgar? Of course, it has to do with their meaning: Mostly they are about taboo subjects like sex and faeces. But their sound is also no coincidence. Some words just don't sound vulgar.
Soft sounds are apparently less suitable for a crude curse. A certain group of sounds occurs less often in swear words, according to a series of studies in the "Psychonomic Bulletin & Review". This suggests that these sounds sound less vulgar and offensive, write Shiri Lev-Ari and Ryan McKay of the University of London.
In a pilot study, the psychologist and her colleague first looked for regularities in swear words. To do this, they collected vulgar expressions in five highly diverse languages: Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Korean and Russian. They had native speakers and experts reduce them to the most common and coarse swear words. More than 100 words remained. They then compared their phonetic structure with the phonetic structure of the basic vocabulary of the respective language.
In fact, one group of sounds occurred comparatively rarely in the curses: the "approximants". These are sounds such as "l", "r", "w" and "j", in which the air flows gently and evenly out of the middle of the oral cavity, unlike, for example, fricatives such as "f", in which the air has to pass through a narrow spot in the mouth. The latter would therefore sound more offensive than the approximants, where the air flows out of the mouth more softly, Lev-Ari and McKay surmised.
They tested this hypothesis further. To do this, they invented 80 pairs of words that differed in only one sound and presented them to more than 200 people with different native languages: German, Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, Finnish and French. The subjects were asked to rate which of the two made-up words was more likely to be a swear word, for example "sola" or "sotsa". Words with approximants like "sola" were only considered swear words in a good third of the cases, words without approximants like "sotsa" in almost two thirds of the cases.
Approximants make crude swearing more harmless
In the third sub-study, Lev-Ari and McKay analysed the sound changes of the more harmless variants of 24 originally more drastic curses, for example "darn" for the original "damn" or "effing" for "fucking". Approximants occurred more frequently in the harmless variants than in the coarse originals. Psychologists suspect that this is also the reason why the curses seemed less offensive: They were sound-symbolically associated with calm and comfort - possibly they could even help to calm down a tense situation. The two caution, however, against believing that one can completely defuse a vulgar expression with approximatives and use it carelessly.
Curses seem vulgar not only because they refer to taboos such as sex and faeces, but also because of the way they sound, Lev-Ari and McKay conclude. It is true that in some languages, such as French, there are many nasty swear words that contain approximants. Nevertheless, French-speaking test subjects were also more likely to consider the pseudowords without approximants as curses. The association would thus be universal and independent of one's own language - it would be a "universal pattern" of swear words.
The phenomenon of sound symbolism has already been proven many times. According to this, the assignment of sounds to a meaning is not entirely random; rather, some sounds are associated with a particular meaning, such as the "i" with small things and the "m" with round shapes. 2020 one study listed 125 such associations. Such associations can, for example, also occur with first names and create an image of the person in the mind's eye.
Spectrum of Science
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