Gender Analysis on Slang: Swear Use Among University Students

As cited in the study of Amir & Azisah (2017), Crowley & Himmelweit (1994) stated that ‘gender’ refers to the way, in particular society, people are socially constructed to behave and experience themselves as ‘women’ or ‘men’. Although all societies appear to treat women and men differently and thus have some notion of gender, what is consists of varies enormously from one society to another.

Talking about the effect of the gender on slang language using and swearing it would be rational to refer to some studies on the issue. In her paper Gati (2015) claims that women swear less than men but more when they are in the company of their own gender and her study proves this claim. Her study shows the most common functions of chosen swear words that women use. Jay’s (1992) research have displayed that %32 of the swear words utterances were used by the females as shown in Gati’s (2015) work. According to Gati (2015, p. 7), The findings of Jay’s (1992) study resulted in these eleven most common swear words in different gender constellations. In addition, women min using less swear words while they are met with a reporter of the opposite sex than they are met with the same sex reporter. It can be argued that it is more natural for women to use taboo words in the chat with the same sex when it is counted as total usage of taboo words (Hughes, 1992).

Although Gati (2015), Fägersten (2012), Finn (2017), Novianti (2017) and some other literature have a tendency to include the morphology and syntactic features of swear words or slang language items; in our paper, the structural features or morphology of slang language items will not be taken into consideration, but the frequency of participants’ usage, their responses and expectations will.

Humans are thought to have been using swear words since the rise of human language (Vingerhoets, 2013), and it is considered to be a fundamental and omnipresent characteristic of human interaction. According to the study of Jay (2009), swearing has been documented in the spoken language of many social groups; high school, college students, workers, soldiers, police, patients, prisoners, and so on. A standard human-being uses 15.000 - 16.000 words in one day and the usage rate of the taboo words in their speeches corresponds to 0.5% to 0.7% and it equals to roughly 80 - 90 words (Jay, 2009).

Slang language and swear words include so many different forms that some distinctions or categorization need be made at first. People use swear words for a couple of reasons; to insult/hurt other people, to express their aggravation to somebody or something, to use expletives as a reflex in a sudden pain or situation, and people can also be exposed to swear words by others according to similar reasons (Güvendir, 2015). Jay and Janschewitz (2008) claim that primary drive for swearing at someone strongly is to express emotions, especially anger and frustration. Finn (2017) classifies swearing into two main categories: propositional and non-propositional swearing. According to this distinction, propositional swearing includes dysphemistic, euphemistic, abusive, idiomatic, and emphatic swearing, while the users of those kind of speakers have a definite objective in their usage (Pinker, 2007). In her study, Finn (2017) claimed that NNSs (non-native speakers) may not be aware of the appropriacy level of swearing in different situations under the effect of frequent usage of swearing in popular culture. As cited in Finn (2017), Time Magazine reported that ‘Young readers encounter about seven instance of profanity per hour. Thus, an official from CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System) reported that three of the top-ten pop songs in the US in 2011 have used f-word in the title of the songs. (Finn, 2017).

Likewise to study of C.M. Staley and Timothy B. Jay has also asked to some university students to figure out the probability and the aggressiveness rate of using swear words as a behave of the speaker, position of the utterance, and specific word used, to test the effect of the contextual changings on using taboo words in a detailed way. As mentioned in Jay & Janschewitz (2008), unlike to different ways of communication, swearing mainly aims to express connotative or sentimental meaning; these meanings of the expletives/swearing words are generally interpreted as connotative (Jay and Danks, 1977).

Methodology

The main question of this study is about the usage of slang language kinds of Middle East Technical University students in their daily communication especially in spoken language. The second and sub-question is to test the frequency of slang language/swear words usage of the participants on some specific categories of that language, such as; excretory, sexual, mixed and profanity. These two questions will be examined through the questionnaire.

Participants

The participants of the questionnaire are fifty undergraduate students who study in Middle East Technical University. Among these fifty participants, twenty-five of them are male students while the other twenty-five are female students. This equality will help us to contribute to make an analysis of differences between both genders on using expletives/swear words on some specific cases.

The participants of the questionnaire are among from volunteer university students. Since the content of the questionnaire includes situational questions that could yield to instant responses or reactions, the participants are asked to give their personal answers in verbal format, not as a behavioral or written reaction. In addition, the number of participants is specifically kept at fifty, that it will be a common useful point while the results and findings of the questionnaire will be interpreted and discussed later in the research period because if the number of the participants would be below than fifty, the results of the questionnaire will be questionable in terms of validity and reliability of this research.

Since our questionnaire has been prepared in Turkish language because of the purpose to observe responses of native speakers, the participants are selected from Turkish students to get proper and natural reactions in native language. Thus, the reactions or responses for the questions could be given in English language (i.e. f.ck, sh.t and similar expressions are also counted as proper responses), since the participants study in an English - medium university in terms of language instruction. In this paper, ethnicity, age, socio-cultural or educational backgrounds of the participants are not regarded as dependent variables. The participants are selected from different locations and departments of Middle East Technical University, not from a single classroom or department, to evaluate the university campus as a general environment with its differences all around the campus.

Data Collection Tools

The questionnaire, which includes twenty different situations from real-life scenarios, is used in this paper as data collection tool. The questionnaire used in this paper has been taken and adapted from Staley’s (1978) study titled as ‘Male-Female Use of Expletives: A Heck of a Difference in Expectations’ published in Anthropological Linguistics Journal. The reasons of selecting this questionnaire are that the questionnaire include specific situations that could provoke the participants to give responses including slang language items within in their real-life communication. In this study, Staley’s questionnaire is selected since this research content - that is swear words and slang language items - has already been used by a Turkish researcher, Seyda Ozcaliskan (1994). In her research paper is called as; “Kadınların ve Erkeklerin Küfür Kullanımı Üzerine’’ and it was conducted in Bosphorus University students, but the research time was very short and the number of the participants was very low to observe some specific cases in a crowded place. In Turkish research literature, there has not been done enough studies on this topic and the study of Ozcaliskan was carried out in the year 1994, so it passed a long time. One of the main aims of this study is to compensate for this time and validity issue on this context, slang language usage.

In the questionnaire, the participants are asked to give their verbal expressions under different scenarios. For example: The participants are asked to give his/her responses when they are with a foreigner from different gender in an elevator in the first question. In addition, they are asked to express their verbal responses when they are together with a classmate from the same gender in 13th question. The questionnaire also includes some gender-free situations/questions: For example, the participants are asked to give their responses when they are having a conversation with their family members. In question 10, the participants are in discussion with their fathers about political or religious ideas, while they are in a conversation with their mothers about some advices on future life of son/daughter. There are also different scenarios, when the participants are asked to explain their reactions when they are alone. For example, the participant is alone in Question 3 and s/he cut his/her finger deeply when s/he slices cheese.

This variety of situations given in the questionnaire could stimulate the participants to give their natural utterances. On the other hand, some of the questions from the Staley’s original questionnaire have been changed, updated and adapted to the changing world and the regular setting of the research study (University Campus area) in order to fit our target participants and to protect the validity and reliability because the study does not observe other social circles except of Middle East Technical University students. For example, Question-15 has been changed into a specific situation that can be found in METU campus. The participants are asked to express their utterances while they are late for campus

Design and Procedure

The participants are selected from different locations in METU as mentioned. The questionnaire consists twenty different situations. each of the questions is defined separately: for example, Question-1 is named as Asansör, Question-2 is named as Çekici Biri, Question-3 is named as Peynir. The possible outcomes from the participants’ responses are divided and analyzed within four categories of swear types and one category is allocated to non-slang usage.

1 - Excretory (B.ku yedik, S.çayım böyle işe)

2 - Sexual (Hass.tir, Sh.t, A..na koyayım, S.kerim)

3 - Mixed (Allah belanı versin, ağzına s..ayım; Lastiğine tüküreyim, a..ına koduğumun Ringi)

4 - Profanity (Ulan, Kahretsin, Oha/Çüş, Hadi/Yapma Be, Manyak/Salak)

0- Responses does not include any swear words.

The instruction is given in Turkish, because the participants’ mother language is Turkish language. Instruction is as the following: when the instructions are given to a participant, he/she is told there is no time limit to finish the questionnaire, but most participants are able to finish the questionnaire within 10 or 15 minutes. When this individual participant asks a question about one of the situations in the questionnaire, the researcher explains the questions or problems.