A Dataset of Self-Reported Attitudes to Afrikaans Swearwords

Abstract

Until recently, no research has ever been done on user attitudes to Afrikaans taboo language. To address this shortcoming, a multidisciplinary research project was initiated to investigate, among others, user attitudes to swearwords. Online single-word surveys (SWSs) for individual swearwords have been posted periodically on the project website.1 Volunteer respondents are recruited through respondent-driven opportunistic sampling and snow-ball sampling via social media. Respondents firstly give their informed consent, and then once-off provide some sociodemographic information. Thereafter, each swearword is judged on at least seven attitudinal dimensions. All data are stored in a relational database, and then extracted to create a single UTF-8 encoded CSV file. The dataset holds great potential for perusal in numerous language-specific (i.e., Afrikaans) sociopragmatic and/or sociolinguistic investigations and applications, as well as for comparative linguistic research and general statistical modelling.

Keywords

• afrikaans
• offensive language
• offensiveness
• rating
• swearing
• swearword
• taboo language
• tabooness