A Sociolinguistics Study of Conversational Swearing in Iran

Abstract

As a lingual feature, ‘swearing’ has been presented since long among different cultures with various conceptual and linguistic realizations. In this study an attempt has been made to represent a comprehensive taxonomy of swear expressions in contemporary Persian language. Data were collected from the actual performance of speakers in their daily conversations and undertakings. The corpus yielded itself to a taxonomy including 15 categories and 7 subcategories. From among more than 250 natural instances of swear expressions about 45 instances have been provided in the form of sentences in the body of the article and at a table in the Appendix. The research findings made it clear that religious oaths, swearing by holy times, foods and meals, parts of body, and family members were respectively the top most frequent categories of Persian swear expressions in the context of research.