Taboo Language and Language Change: Current Knowledge

Gerhard van Huyssteen

The Slurring Terms Across Languages (STAL) network (https://sites.google.com/view/stalnetwork/home) invites you to a talk by Gerhard Van Huyssteen (North-West University) entitled "Taboo Language and Language Change: Current Knowledge". The talk will take place online on JUNE 9, 14:30-16:00 Central European Time (CET), and is part of the of STAL Seminar series (https://sites.google.com/view/stalnetwork/seminar). If you want to participate, please write to [email protected] for the Zoom link. Below you can find the abstract.

All welcome!

ABSTRACT:

That words and their meanings are naturally unstable and subject to change, is a well-established and largely undisputed fact in modern-day linguistics. However, despite “… the volatile nature of the vocabulary surrounding taboos …” (Burridge and Benczes 2019, 183) being a glaringly obvious study object for historical linguistics, “… it has been only relatively recently that the effects of taboo on language development have made an appearance in the mainstream linguistics literature … [Until recently], [d]iscussions of taboo, even within historical linguistic textbooks, focused on remote examples involving ancient naming rituals and taboos on dangerous animals.” (Burridge and Benczes 2019, 198). This sentiment is echoed by several other scholars, among them Burridge (2012, 88) (who refers to it as “a striking example of scholarly squeamishness”), Van der Sijs (2002, 524-526), and Zenner, Ruette, and Devriendt (2017, 107).

It is especially in language contact situations where the interaction of general language and taboo language is easily noticeable: swearwords are borrowed generously between languages in language contact situations. For example, Van der Sijs (2002, 524-526) shows that roundabout half of the 45 Dutch maledicta that she studied, were loanwords or derivations of such loans. The general explanation for this phenomenon is that loan maledicta make the expression of negative emotions and attitudes more acceptable for conversational participants (Van Sterkenburg 2001, 77), since swearing in one’s first language is “perceived to have a stronger emotional resonance” (Dewaele 2012, 595).

In this presentation, the central research question will be: Given our existing knowledge base of language change, and more specifically lexical semantic change, what do we currently know about the change of taboo words and constructions?

We will firstly aim to give a succinct but comprehensive overview of existing literature on taboo language and language change, drawing on the handful of publications on this topic, among others Allan (2001), Allan and Burridge (1991, 2006), Andersen (2014), Beelen and Van der Sijs (2022), Borkowska and Kleparski (2007), Burridge (2006), Burridge and Benczes (2019), McWhorter (2021), Traugott (2010, 2017), López-Couso (2010), Van der Sijs (2002, 2007), and Zenner, Ruette, and Devriendt (2017). From the literature, some existing theses will be defined and illustrated with examples from Dutch, English, and Afrikaans, and their respectives language contact situations.

Secondly, we will present a case study as testing grounds for the general (hypo)theses about taboo language and language change, viz. on Dutch as donor language. We will show patterns of Dutch taboo loanwords in languages across the globe, but specifically also in languages spoken in former colonies of the Netherlands. This analysis will be based on a dataset extracted from Van der Sijs’ Nederlandse woorden wereldwijd [Dutch words worldwide] (NWWW 2010).