The sound of swearing: Are there universal patterns in profanity? | Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

Why do swear words sound the way they do? Swear words are often thought to have sounds that render them especially fit for purpose, facilitating the expression of emotion and attitude. To date, however, there has been no systematic cross-linguistic investigation of phonetic patterns in profanity. In an initial, pilot study we explored statistical regularities in the sounds of swear words across a range of typologically distant languages. The best candidate for a cross-linguistic phonemic pattern in profanity was the absence of approximants (sonorous sounds like l, r, w and y). In Study 1, native speakers of various languages (Arabic, Chinese, Finnish, French, German, Spanish; N = 215) judged foreign words less likely to be swear words if th