Canadians might have a reputation for being polite, but a survey shows that Canada is one of the most potty-mouthed nations in the world.
Wordtips, a word finder for Scrabble and Words with Friends, analyzed a sample of 1.7 million tweets in English to see which countries use the most swear words. Swearing is becoming more natural for netizens as English becomes the most common language online.
“It used to be that the only media you could consume was highly edited,” says Benjamin Bergen, author of What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves.
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“With social media, all of a sudden now we have direct access to people’s informal language. If we have access to people’s informal communication and it includes more profanity, that just means we’re going to be exposed to more of it, and that’s going to normalize it, and so people have become inured.”
So, which country ranks the highest for having the most potty-mouthed internet users? That dubious honour goes to the US, with 41.6 tweets per 1,000 featuring curse words, followed by the UK in second place with 28.6 posts with swear words per 1,000 tweets.
Canada is fifth, with 24.6 profanity-laden posts per 1,000 tweets; Australia is third (26.6), and New Zealand is fourth (25.2).
Wordtips
It’s important to note that English is the official (or co-official) language in the top five countries that swear the most.
Jean-Marc Dewaele, a linguistics professor at the University of London, suggests that in countries where English is the second language, Internet users may not be comfortable with swearing as they “may either lack or doubt their understanding of how offensive a swear word is or when it is appropriate to use it.”
Due to censorship, people are also less likely to swear, making it harder to learn the “culture of swearing.”
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Internet users in Bahrain (4.3), Azerbaijan (5.0), and Saudi Arabia (5.6) are the least likely to swear. However, Kuwaiti users are even less likely to swear among all the countries surveyed, with just 3.6 profanity-laced tweets per 1,000.
In comparison, Canadians seem to relish their freedom to express themselves with F-bombs and other popular swear words. The survey states, “Swearing has become fun again, and this time, everyone’s invited.”