Guest Lecture by Dr. Martin Schweinberger

The paper presented in this talk takes a corpus-based approach to analyze vulgar language in online communication across 20 English-speaking regions based on the Global Web-Based English Corpus (GloWbE). The identification of vulgar items combined word lists used in profanity detection with regular expressions to identify a wide range of vulgar elements including spelling variants. The results show a notable trend for inner circle L1-varieties to exhibit higher rates of vulgarity online compared to expanding/outer circle and L2-varieties. The results also show that inner circle varieties have lower type-token rations which indicates that inner circle variety speakers are more creating and rely on a larger repertoire of vulgar elements compared with speakers from other varieties.