How Twitter helps us track the lexicon of intolerance

Justin Thomas's accidental use of an Arabic expletive has led him down an interesting research path

The language we use in confronting situation can say a lot about us. Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

Once, while teaching a class of Emirati students, I decided to show off my Arabic skills. Loudly and overconfidently, I uttered an Arabic phrase to a young woman sitting in the front row. She instantly turned bright red, the room fell deadly silent and everyone gazed at me with a mixture of shock, horror and disbelief.

In my haste to impress I had mispronounced a word, transforming my harmless utterance into a disrespectful curse containing a highly emotive expletive. The torturous silence that followed was eventually broken by a kindly student: “Sir, I think you meant to say … not …”

Profanity is a powerful provoker of emotion in others, particularly negative emotions such as disgust and anger. We can also use profanity to express our own negative or high-energy emotions. If I accidentally bump my car, I might let a swear word slip. If I score the winning goal in the 90th minute of a football match, I might let a celebratory swear word slip. Unfortunately, celebratory swearing is far less common than the negative type.

Some people swear simply because they think it is cool. They use profanity to construct a desired social identity, swearing to fit in or stand out. But how can you utter taboo words without feeling the associated emotion? The simple answer is, with practice. Habituation takes the sting out of most things. Another answer is to do all your swearing in a second language – use the “other tongue” rather than the mother tongue.

Bilinguals can often swear with relative immunity in their second language, as there is far less emotion associated with it. For the same reason, it is easier to lie in the other tongue. Research even suggests that we might make better, or at least less emotional, decisions when using the other tongue. One study reports that bilinguals working on a hypothetical life-and-death scenario, where far less risk-averse and bias-prone when working in their second language.

This connection between profanity and emotion has made swearing a topic of lasting interest for psychologists. The emergence of Big Data has now also provided new ways of exploring profanity. For instance, Twitter data has been used to explore the relative frequency of swear words across regions – “geoprofanity”. In the United Kingdom, the most foul-mouthed locality, according to Twitter data, was Redcar and Cleveland in North Yorkshire; the least foul-mouthed was Oxford, home of the Oxford English Dictionary.

In collaboration with Pegasus, a UAE-based software technology company, our research team at Zayed University has recently looked at profanity in the UAE’s Twitter data. One notable finding is that swearing in English is massively more frequent than swearing in Arabic, even though Arabic is the most commonly used language on Twitter in the UAE. This observation is open to many interpretations, one being that bilinguals can use profanity in their other tongue (English) with relative emotional ease.

Another observation from the Twitter data is that the relative use of Arabic profanity decreases slightly each Friday (the holy day), and massively decreases during Ramadan.

This pattern is fairly dramatic and you can predict the exact day when swearing once again returns to its pre-Ramadan levels and beyond. Swearing can give offence – and sometimes that is the intention. Perhaps during Ramadan people are less inclined to cause each other offence?

The idea that swear words can cause offence is obvious. This is particularly the case in relation to profanity aimed at race, gender, disability, sexuality and so on. Let’s call this type of profanity the lexicon of intolerance. Overtime, Big Data will become a useful tool for monitoring the progress of efforts aimed at fostering an increasingly tolerant UAE.

Dr Justin Thomas is an associate professor at Zayed University

On Twitter: @DrJustinThomas