US Leads Great Britain And Australia In The Use Of Profanity

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A new study into the prevalence and use of vulgar language (profanity) in English speaking countries has found that the United States leads the rest of the English-speaking world by far when it comes to using vulgar language online. This will certainly come as blow to Australia and Great Britain

While this obviously doesn’t apply to 100% of the populations in Great Britain and Australia, in my traveling experience it generally takes less than 5 minutes of conversation with someone from these places before they tell me Americans ‘just can’t take a joke’ or that we’re too sensitive. Aussies also seem to take some perverse pride in using the ‘See You Next Tuesday’ word just to see if it’ll elicit some sort of a response from Americans.

If you know me, then you know that I’m ‘Team Say Anything That’s On Your Mind’ and the more creatively you can express your thoughts the better, and that certainly applies to the use of profanity. Semi-related, one of my favorite episodes of the Freakonomics podcast is about the use of profanity and I highly suggest everyone give it a listen….But let’s get to this study!

USA Leads English Speaking Countries In Profanity Use Online According To New Study

An article published yesterday on CNN by The Conversation sums up the new research study published by The Conversation but obviously the headline on CNN caught my attention: ‘201 ways to say ‘f—‘: what 1.7 billion words of online text shows about how the world swears.’ How could I be expected to see that and scroll past?

For the study, they looked at “more than 1.7 billion words of online language across 20 English-speaking regions” and found 597 different forms of swear words used across online chatter… Shorthand like ‘WTF’ or instances where ‘$’ is used in place of an ‘S’ and stuff like that.

What they found is ‘vulgar words’ aka profanity accounted for 0.036% of all words used online from the United States. Those numbers steeply drop off to 0.025% for Great Britain and 0.022% for Australia. Which means that the USA is #1 at using profanity online and I think we, as a country, should take a W when we can get it.

The data found that between 12-13.3% of all Americans used profanity online compared to just 9.4% of Australians and 10% of Brits. Again, that’s a W for Team America.

Interestingly, the study found the F-Word and its countless variants to be the most commonly used vulgar term amongst Americans while Australians used it with the least frequency and with the least amount of creativity. +1 for the good guys once again.

Hilariously, Singapore somehow ranked 4th in the usage of English profanity online. Singapore’s national languages are Malay, Tamil, Chinese (Singapore dialect), and English. So it is a commonly spoken language but for them to outrank other fully English speaking countries in English profanity use online deserves some sort of special recognition. Meanwhile, Canada’s just happy to be included on the list and they tie Jamaica for profanity use online.

You can check out the full article on CNN here to learn more, or read the full study published in Science Direct right here.