Browsing by Author "Ronni, Elina"

Swearing is a natural part of communication especially in spoken language. There are many studies about spoken language and slang but not as much on swearing. Particularly children’s swear words hasn’t been studied much. In this study, the focus is on the children’s swear words and on the situations the words are used in. The aim of this study is to answer three research questions: 1. Which swear words are used by L2-students? 2. In what kind of interactions were the swear words used? 3. To whom the swear words were addressed? This study is a qualitative case study and the material was gathered as a part of research project called Long Second. The video was filmed in a school in the 2010’s and the video was analysed by using methods of conversation analysis. Three students, who had Finnish as L2-language, were picked as informants. Two of them had Russian as L1 and one of them had Estonian language as L1. From the one-hour lesson, the amount of swear words and more detailed information about the situations where the swear words were used, was collected. Based on this data, three different categories were formed: talking to oneself, swearing to another student, swearing to all classmates. The results of this study shows that students mostly used swear words when talking to themselves. The most used swear word was bitch and the student who spoke least Finnish swore the most. The second most used type of swearing was swearing to another student and the third one was swearing to the whole class. The function of swearing to another student seemed to create a feeling of belonging to the group for the students. All the boy students swore at least once, so it seemed to be a characteristic way of speaking in this classroom and swearing seemed socially approved. The swearing is used also as a “secret language”, because the teacher does not understand neither Estonian nor Russian. It is clear that one uses swear words to express emotion on one’s mother tongue (L1). In this study, all the students swore mostly on their own mother tongue. The study also showed that swear words were used to show one’s emotions, for example joy or frustration.