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‘Bad language’ (Andersson & Trudgill 1990) has been established as an informal cover term for linguistic forms and practices ranging from nonstandard language to slang (Coleman 2012) and ‘forbidden words’ (Allan & Burridge 2006) such as expletives and swearwords (e.g. Hughes 2006). Corpus-linguistic research on swearing in varieties of English has so far been restricted to Inner Circle varieties (e.g. Love 2021; Schweinberger 2018); research on Outer Circle varieties such as Indian English (IndE) has been limited partly by the lack of suitable corpora: the design features of the ICE-corpora, for example, include a focus on educated standard(ising) language and on representativeness rather than size. This paper takes Lambert’s work on IndE slang (2014) as its point of departure, updating and extending his investigation of ‘bad’ IndE with a special focus on the multilingual range of swearwords available to the contemporary Indian English speech community.

The database to be used lends itself particularly well to the study of swearing: we investigate swear words in two subreddits, i.e., thematic forums on the social media platform Reddit, with different overt political stances. While r/indianews (13,107,349 words) presents itself as politically neutral, r/indiaspeaks (79,097,344 words) is openly nationalist. These subreddits are large enough for the study of lexis (Szmrecsanyi & Rosseel 2020: 31), and they represent interactive language use including a high share of insulting language. In order to cope with the big-data nature of the two subreddits, we identified relevant swear words by combining a word-list approach based on previous literature as well as personal communication with corpus queries for swear words in specific patterns (such as you are (such) a *). The two main research questions we investigate are:

1) Which semantic fields do the swear words on the two subreddits belong to, and are there differences between Hindi vs. English expressions as far as these semantic fields are concerned?
2) Do the political alignments of the two subreddits – r/indianews as politically neutral and r/indiaspeaks as right-leaning – potentially lead to higher frequencies of Hindi-based swear words in r/indiaspeaks (and vice versa for English in r/indianews)?

Our preliminary results confirm that swearing in both Hindi and English is surprisingly frequent in the subreddits, both of which express in their rules that users should not be abusive or offensive (although r/indiaspeaks provides more details). Further, while IndE on Reddit shares a predilection for the lemma FUCK with informal spoken British English (Love 2021: 750), the actual realization displays nativization to different degrees: either by using a Hindi expression (e.g. madarchod ‘motherfucker’), a calque from Hindi such as sisterfucker (see also Lambert 2014: 129), or English expressions adapted to the Indian contexts such as cowfucker.

References
Allan, Keith & Kate Burridge (2006). Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Andersson, Lars-Gunnar & Peter Trudgill (1990). Bad Language. Oxford: Blackwell. Coleman, Julie (2012). The Life of Slang. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hughes, Geoffrey (2006). An Encyclopedia of Swearing: The Social History of Oaths, Profanity, Foul Language, and Ethnic Slurs in the English-Speaking World. London: Routledge.
Lambert, James (2014). Indian English slang. In Julie Coleman (ed.), Global English Slang: Methodologies and Perspectives. London: Routledge, 124-134.
Love, Robbie (2021). Swearing in informal spoken English: 1990s–2010s. Text & Talk 41(5- 6): 739-762.
Schweinberger, Martin (2018). Swearing in Irish English: A corpus-based quantitative analysis of the sociolinguistics of swearing. Lingua 209: 1-20.
Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt & Laura Rosseel (2020). English corpus linguistics. In Bas Aarts, April McMahon, & Lars Hinrichs (eds.), The Handbook of English Linguistics. Oxford: Wiley, 29-44.