The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Expletives of lower working-class women
Abstract
For many decades, women's speech has been seen as being very different from that used by men. Stereotyped as swearing less, using less slang, and as aiming for more standard speech style, women were judged according to their sex rather than other aspects of their lives, such as class and economic situation. With many critics now challenging these ideas, this article sets out to look at the reality of the swearing used by a group of women from a deprived inner-city area. Their constant use of strong expletives flies in the face of the theories proffered of the “correctness” of the language of women. (Expletives, taboo words, working-class women, female speech, female group, social networks, sociolinguistics, inner-city England)
Overview
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
In the citing paper
“While women in the middle classes have historically avoided swearing, swearing indexes localized norms of communicating for working-class women (Hughes, 1992).”
From Swear(ING) ain't play(ING): The interaction of taboo language and the sociolinguistic variable (2023) · cites this paper as Hughes, 1992
In the citing paper
“Swearing is associated with a multiplicity of meanings outside of offensiveness, including toughness (Hughes, 1992), intimacy or trust (Stapleton, 2003), humor (Stapleton, 2010), trustworthiness and intelligence (DeFrank & Kahlbaugh, 2019), and increased persuasiveness (Cavazza & Guidetti, 2014).”
From Swear(ING) ain't play(ING): The interaction of taboo language and the sociolinguistic variable (2023) · cites this paper as Hughes, 1992
In the citing paper
“Second, like alveolar [ɪn], swearwords often have a socioindexical association with working class speech (Cheshire, 1982;Hughes, 1992;Romaine, 1999;Stapleton, 2010).”
From Swear(ING) ain't play(ING): The interaction of taboo language and the sociolinguistic variable (2023) · cites this paper as Hughes, 1992
Citations
Cites
No references could be resolved yet.
Research works printed but not linked: 13
- Hudson, 1980, Sociolinguistics
- Chaika, 1982, Language: The social mirror
- 10.1017/S0047404500012434 · DOI
- Trudgill, 1983, Sociolinguistics: An introduction to language and society
- Milroy, 1980, Language and social networks
- Coates, 1988, Women in their speech communities
- Coates, 1986, Women, men and language: A sociolingusitic account of sex differences in language
- Labov W. , (1968). A study of the non-standard English of Negro and Puerto Rican speakers in New York City. Cooperative Research Project 3288, vol. 1. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Office of Education.
- 10.1017/S0047404500000488 · DOI
- Gomm I. (1981). A study of the inferior image of the female use of the English language as compared to that of the male. Unpublished B.A. dissertation, Edge Hill College, Ormskirk.
- 10.1080/00335637409383203 · DOI
- Thorne, 1975, Language and sex: Difference and dominance
- Pahl, 1975, Whose city?
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Swear(ING) ain't play(ING): The interaction of taboo language and the sociolinguistic variable
Hunt, M., Cotter, C., Pearson, H., & Stockall, L. (2023) · Journal of Sociolinguistics · doi:10.1111/josl.12588 · Cited by 5
Metadata
- Authors
- Hughes, S. E.
- Venue
- Language in Society
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press (CUP)
- Published
- 1992-06
- Volume
- 21
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 291-303
- ISSN
- 0047-4045
- 1469-8013
- Cited by
- 36
- References
- 0
- Language
- en
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Expletives of lower working-class women. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1017/s004740450001530x
- The paper
- Hughes, S. E. (1992). Expletives of lower working-class women. Language in Society. https://doi.org/10.1017/s004740450001530x
