Digitala Vetenskapliga Arkivet

Change search
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf
Do we swear more with friends or with acquaintances? F#ck in social networks
Linnaeus University, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Department of Languages. University of Eastern Finland, Finland. (DISA-DH)ORCID iD: 0000-0003-3123-6932
University of Eastern Finland, Finland.
Linnaeus University, Faculty of Technology, Department of computer science and media technology (CM). University of Eastern Finland, Finland.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-3000-0381
University of Eastern Finland, Finland.ORCID iD: 0000-0003-3123-6932
2025 (English)In: Lingua, ISSN 0024-3841, E-ISSN 1872-6135, Vol. 320, article id 103931Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

We investigate the uses of fuck in digital social networks from social media, Twitter/X in this case. Social media outlets have so far been predominantly treated as massive text collections, but they can be effectively used to investigate the role of social networks in shaping human communication. We use user-generated texts from 5,660 social networks (with 435,345 users and 7.8 billion words) from three settings (UK, US, and Australia). With embedded network information, this massive dataset enables us to investigate how network properties, that of the size and the strength of the network, influence the use of offensive words in these three settings. Our findings show that Americans use fuck most frequently, while Australians least frequently but they are highly creative with spelling variants of the word. Contrary to prior studies, we observe that people on this social media application swear more with acquaintances than with friends, but only in smaller networks − in larger networks of >100 people, the differences level out. Overall, this study highlights the benefits of using social media data that can be enriched to allow access to the social networks that people interact in.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Elsevier, 2025. Vol. 320, article id 103931
Keywords [en]
Swearing in interaction, Social networks, Social media, Fuck, Sociolinguistics
National Category
Studies of Specific Languages
Research subject
Humanities, English
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-137666DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103931ISI: 001459245100001Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-105001098112OAI: oai:DiVA.org:lnu-137666DiVA, id: diva2:1948648
Funder
European CommissionAcademy of Finland, 345640Academy of Finland, 358725Academy of Finland, 364048Academy of Finland, 367757Academy of Finland, FIRI 2022\u201329Available from: 2025-03-31 Created: 2025-03-31 Last updated: 2025-04-15Bibliographically approved

Open Access in DiVA

fulltext(2444 kB)25 downloads
File information
File name FULLTEXT01.pdfFile size 2444 kBChecksum SHA-512
0054c1c52c2a456def3dd543956ca932e791eadccc52769f3f97bdc175d45cdf3f2580a21080a9d0dda88c293512d71e68a082da387b4b3606c64622929b2cc5
Type fulltextMimetype application/pdf

Other links

Publisher's full textScopus

Search in DiVA

By author/editor
Laitinen, MikkoFatemi, MasoudHalonen, Mikko
By organisation
Department of LanguagesDepartment of computer science and media technology (CM)
In the same journal
Lingua
Studies of Specific Languages

Search outside of DiVA

GoogleGoogle Scholar
Total: 25 downloads
The number of downloads is the sum of all downloads of full texts. It may include eg previous versions that are now no longer available

doi
urn-nbn

Altmetric score

doi
urn-nbn
Total: 34 hits
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf