Profanity, also known as swearing, cursing, or cussing, involves the use of notionally offensive words for a variety of purposes, including to demonstrate disrespect or negativity, to relieve pain, to express a strong emotion, as a grammatical intensifier or emphasis, or to express informality or conversational intimacy. In many formal or polite social situations, it is considered impolite, and in some religious groups it is considered a sin. Profanity includes slurs, but most profanities are not slurs, and there are many insults that do not use swear words.
The term four-letter word serves as a euphemism for words that are often considered profane or offensive.
Quebec French profanities, known as sacres, are words and expressions related to Catholicism and its liturgy that are used as strong profanities in Quebec French and in Acadian French. Sacres are considered stronger in Québec than the foul expressions common to other varieties of French, which centre on sex and excrement.
Mat is the term for vulgar, obscene, or profane language in Russian and some other Slavic language communities.
The Spanish language employs a wide range of swear words that vary between Spanish speaking nations and in regions and subcultures of each nation. Idiomatic expressions, particularly profanity, are not always directly translatable into other languages, and so most of the English translations offered in this article are very rough and most likely do not reflect the full meaning of the expression they intend to translate.[c]
Profanity in Finnish is used in the form of intensifiers, adjectives, adverbs and particles, and is based on varying taboos, with religious vulgarity being very prominent. It often uses aggressive mood which involves omission of the negative verb ei while implying its meaning with a swear word.
Profanity in Mandarin Chinese most commonly involves sexual references and scorn of the object's ancestors, especially their mother. Other Mandarin insults accuse people of not being human. Compared to English, scatological and blasphemous references are less often used. In this article, unless otherwise noted, the traditional character will follow its simplified form if it is different.
The Korean language has a number of words that are considered profanity.
American Sign Language (ASL), the sign language used by the deaf community throughout most of North America, has a rich vocabulary of terms, which include profanity. Within deaf culture, there is a distinction drawn between signs used to curse versus signs that are used to describe sexual acts. In usage, signs to describe detailed sexual behavior are highly taboo due to their graphic nature. As for the signs themselves, some signs do overlap, but they may also vary according to usage. For example, the sign for "shit" when used to curse is different from the sign for "shit" when used to describe the bodily function or the fecal matter.
Italian profanity are profanities that are blasphemous or inflammatory in the Italian language.
The five most common Cantonese profanities, vulgar words in the Cantonese language are diu (屌/𨳒), gau (㞗/𨳊/鳩), lan (𡳞/𨶙/撚), tsat (杘/𨳍/柒) and hai (㞓/屄/閪), where the first ("diu") literally means fuck, "hai" is a word for female genitalia and "gau" refers to male genitalia. They are sometimes collectively known as the "outstanding five in Cantonese" (廣東話一門五傑). These five words are generally offensive and give rise to a variety of euphemisms and minced oaths. Similar to the seven dirty words in the United States, these five words are forbidden to say and are bleep-censored on Hong Kong broadcast television. Other curse phrases, such as puk gai (仆街/踣街) and ham gaa caan (冚家鏟/咸家鏟), are also common.
The following is a list of words and formulations commonly used as profanity throughout Romania.
Profanity in science fiction (SF) shares all of the issues of profanity in fiction in general, but has several unique aspects of its own, including the use of alien profanities.
Hokkien is one of the largest Chinese language groups worldwide. Profanity in Hokkien most commonly involves sexual references and scorn of the object's ancestors, especially their mother. The mentioning of sexual organs is frequently used in Hokkien profanity.
Profanity in the Norwegian language is referred to in Norwegian as banneord or simply upassende språk. Many words are characterized by dialect. The offensiveness and strength of a word may be very different between regions.
Swedish profanity can be divided into several categories. A substantial number of curse words in Swedish have religious origins. Euphemistic variants of the religious curses are commonly used as well. References to genitalia or bodily functions are common in the Swedish profanity vocabulary. Notably, no word for sexual intercourse is commonly used in invectives, unlike many other languages. However, calques of English fuck using knull (noun), knulla (verb) do occur; this comes across as more offensive than fuck does in English. In general, knull(a), along with genitalia slang words like kuk ('cock') and fitta ('cunt') are the most offensive single words. By contrast, most of the traditional religious profanities are not considered very offensive today; this is in line with Sweden's long-standing secularism.
Tagalog profanity can refer to a wide range of offensive, blasphemous, and taboo words or expressions in the Tagalog language of the Philippines. Due to Filipino culture, expressions which may sound benign when translated back to English can cause great offense; while some expressions English speakers might take great offense to can sound benign to a Tagalog speaker. Filipino, the national language of the Philippines, is the standard register of Tagalog, so as such the terms Filipino profanity and Filipino swear words are sometimes also employed.
Georgian profanity refers to inflammatory vulgar, obscene or profane language in Georgian that some of the words and phrases even evolved into a modern Georgian slang. For exact and comprehensive pronunciation of words and phrases, especially ones written with the apostrophes, the rules of Romanization of Georgian and IPA are essential.
The Hindustani language employs a large number of profanities across the Hindustani-speaking diaspora. Idiomatic expressions, particularly profanity, are not always directly translatable into other languages, and make little sense even when they can be translated. Many English translations may not offer the full meaning of the profanity used in the context.
Junczyk is a Polish surname.
