The profanity gap in contemporary Spanish society

Abstract

Abstract This paper examines sex differences in the use of expletives in spontaneous informal conversations among the contestants in the Spanish version of Big Brother. The results of the analysis of a corpus of 33,050 words empirically support some of the previous findings of self-reported use obtained from questionnaires and interviews. However, some unexpected findings were also noted – two of the women employ profanity more commonly than two out of the five male participants and one female swears particularly often in mixed-sex conversations. According to the results of the study, the ‘profanity gap’ in Spanish society may be narrowing, but it has not completely disappeared.