Bad Mouths: Taboo and Transgressive Language

Abstract

The academic literature on taboo language is flourishing not only in fields such as linguistic anthropology or sociolinguistics, but also in disciplines that usually target language itself as the object of study. Although there is more than a century of scholarly writing on taboo language, new and neglected areas and directions continue to provide valuable insights on a universal linguistic behavior. This review tracks four sometimes overlapping clusters: naming and linguistic avoidance behaviors, taboo language and transgression, taboo language in language contact situations, and taboo language in educational settings and other contexts. The discussion in this review includes examples of how taboo language is inextricably meshed with the relationships found among kinship circles, subcultural group members, generational cohorts, and other social groupings. New areas of research that are proving to be attractive to scholars include taboo language in global media translation, subtitling or scalation, language contact situations, and the teaching of taboo terms in second language instruction.