Language Module

LanguageHat has a post called Chechens don’t lightly curse that’s about just what it says. Chechens, apparently, take cursing very seriously - to the point that telling someone to “fuck their mother,” a common expression in Russian, is a killing (or at least a fighting) matter in Chechen. Or, so says Anatol Lieven in a book explaining Russia’s loss in the Chechen Wars.

The ‘granddads’ forced the younger soldiers to buy useless things from them, hand over all their payøand 20 marks a month was all we got. One young soldier in my squad had had to give most of his pay for a broken clock. I took it to the ‘granddad’, asked him, ‘Why did you sell him this?’ He cursed me. Now we Chechens don’t lightly curse each other — for us, this is a serious business. I broke the clock over his head. I got another three days in the cooler for that…

The “granddad” is, of course, a more senior member of the Russian military - in which hazing is apparently quite fierce. So one presumes this exchange took place in Russian. And indeed, in the footnotes:

Incidentally, it is not quite true that Chechens do not use the Russian expression, ‘xxxx your mother!’ when speaking to each other; but they only do so when speaking in Russian…

Which does sort of expose this as typical ethnic posturing. Consider: most Chechens are, one assumes, completely competent in Russian, probably almost to the level at which they speak Chechen (Ethnologue reports that “most speakers are quite fluent in Russian”). If so, the Chechens who speak Russian near-natively would have linguistic intuitions about cursing in Russian. That is, they wouldn’t simply understand the literal translation of the phrase “fuck your mother,” they’d also know how it felt - meaning approximately how acceptable it is in Russian society. Now, surely offense at a curseword depends entirely upon social context and speaker intent. So, for example, if in English I tell someone to “fuck off,” whether or not it’s offensive at all has everything to do with my tone, the conversational context, and my relationship to the listener. Say it at a poker table and no harm no foul; saying it to my 84-year-old grandmother under any circumstances might well land her in the hospital.

Now - I’m completely open to the idea that different languages may attach different levels of social cost to taboo words (factoring in the context question, of course). My grandmother, after all, will be less tolerant of cursing in general than members of my own generation simply because her generation attaches a greater social cost in general to such words than mine does. In some important sense, we speak different dialects of English, and not just because she’s from Georgia and I’m from North Carolina. Another example - when I lived in Germany (over 10 years ago), there was a hit song called Ich find’ Dich Scheisse (”I think you’re shit”). Which was sort of funny for me, because of course the FCC would never allow such a thing on pop radio here, and yet there it was, playing in our kitchen almost every day for a couple of months. Obviously, whether as a result of the FCC, or just as a general cultural thing, there’s a lower social cost for cursewords in German than there is in English.

But that observation depends to a great extent on my status as a non-native speaker of German. Were I roughly as fluent in German as I am in English, then it probably wouldn’t have occurred to me that there was anything odd about the #4 song having the word “shit” in the chorus.

Which really does make one wonder how someone with presumably near-native profficiency in Russian takes it upon himself to give a taboo phrase more weight than it’s due? This is especially pertinent considering that the author himself admits, in a footnote, that most Chechens regularly use cursewords when speaking in Russian. So which is it? Is Chechen culture fundamentally opposed to taboo words regardless of the language in which they’re uttered, even if it is known to the listener that the word doesn’t carry as much weight in the native language? Or can they, in fact, distinguish between languages, in which case whence the outrage with the Russian soldier for having told him to go fuck his mother?

What’s going on, most likely, is that since the book is for foreign audiences unlikely to be too familiar with Chechnya, the author is projecting his culture’s self-image onto a group of willing listeners. In Japan and Korea most of my conversations with locals I’d just met involved them trying to convince me that their culture was special and, in some way, clearly superior to the rest of the world. Probably nothing different is going on here.

Nevertheless, my own experiences living in foreign countries lead me to think that there are significant differences in how socially acceptable the inventories of cursewords are across languages. There’s certainly room for some languages to have stricter taboos than others. Which is all raises the very interesting question of why certain cultures seem to need taboo words more than others.

I’ve been considering doing a weekly post on “research sociolinguists could do that would actually be useful,” both as a way of blowing off steam about the dismal state of langauge and gender reserach and also as a way of talking about a field of Linguistics that I find fascinating, even if I prefer to think of it as a subfield of Sociology than of Linguistics. One useful thing a sociolinguist can do (probably has done and I just don’t know about it) would be to do a cross-lingusitic comparison of the force of taboo words. I expect that this could even be done online for some languages - with frequency acting as a kind of proxy for acceptability - though of course with the caveat that it has to be frequency across genres. Which, in CompLing terms, would be like saying that you take all internet pages in a particular language as a corpus and impose, as a requirement for “acceptability,” that the word have a high Julliand’s D score before calling it “acceptable.”

In any case, what I always find interesting about cultural chauvinists is that their arguments tend to rely on the general sameness of people across cultures. If Western and Chechen cultures were really radically different, then we wouldn’t be able to appreciate the “goodness” of putting a high social premium on cursewords. Getting this point across requires the author to rely on the universal existence of cursewords - to varying levels of social acceptability - across all cultures. Meaning that everyone understands, in the required sense, that cursewords are used to insult - even the barbaric Russians - and Chechnya doesn’t turn out to be so special after all.