I may talk in English but gaali toh Hindi mein hi denge : A study of English-Hindi code-switching and swearing pattern on social networks

Abstract

Swearing is a prevalent phenomenon, in regular conversations as well as on social media. Whether multilinguals have a preference for a language while swearing and if so, what factors influence it, is an interesting question that has intrigued linguists, but large scale studies of multilingual swearing behavior has been impossible due to unavailability of data. In this study with English and Romanized Hindi tweets from multilingual Indian users, for the first time, we show that indeed when people code-switch, there is a strong preference for swearing in the dominant language, i.e. Hindi in this case. We also study the correlations between topic, gender and language preferences while swearing.