Women are mostly construed in the perceptions of society that they need to behave in a refined manner and not swear. Even in this modern era, most corporate and highly educated women are assumed to behave according to social norms. Gender inequality also plays a part but this was not the case to be studied. Instead, the current study will look at social context as a whole. Since the purpose is to better understand the occurrence and functions of profanities, social context must be intervened in this study.
Yet, it is challenging when the research is dealing with the ever-changing phenomena of sociology. In the multicultural context of Malaysia, more often people are assumed to swear more in their first language or adopted words from their counterparts. Conversations confined within one race might result in different modes of swearing with certain vulgar words transferred from either their first or second language. This gives the upper hand in approaching issues like swearing in a different light. Thus the present study aims to investigate the twofold of objectives to address the problems in this study:
To what extent do working Malaysian Chinese women swear in a naturally occurring setting and how often do they swear in their conversation?
What are the functions of swearing in the conversation of young professional Malaysian Chinese women confined to this culturally-diversified context?
The significance of this study will help shed light on the perspectives of the society in the construction of women's image and provide better understanding in terms of the use of foul language. Perhaps, meanings and messages could be conveyed efficiently, whereby solidarity and rapport could be built upon the use of notorious language. However, the study is limited to a particular gender (female), race (Chinese), context (Malaysian culture) and age of participants (20-30), albeit setting is not confined solely to formality (e.g.: office).
Literature Review
Several researches have been done in the area of profanity especially on bad language usage and gender differences. Svensson (2004) looked at gender differences in swearing between two nationalities (British, Swedish) with analysis on formal and informal texts by the British National Corpus (BNC). Her investigation had shown that younger people (23-50) find vulgarity acceptable, whilst 14 out of 100 agrees that men are on the upper hand when it comes to swearing. In support of her study, Archer et.al (2001) found that when it comes to building their alter ego, 64 diversified ethnicity of working men curse more to portray masculinity. McEnery & Xiao (2004) had also looked at the BNC in order to investigate the patterns of the word 'fuck' in spoken and written registers. Palacios-Martínez (2010) has also done a study in the British context and corpus linguistics to examine the teenagers' expression of negation by using the same method with COLT (Bergen Corpus of London Teenage). His study is concerned with the typical feature of teenage language (negative polarity system) and the descriptions of it; with comparisons of negative expressions by adults from aspects of syntactic, lexical and pragmatic.
Whilst many papers are corpus-driven, there are also researchers whom looked at different perspectives of linguistics. Langley (2004) has experimented on British and Swedish participants' gender swearing in a poll comparison to view from a linguistic perspective (euphemism) and the relationship with swearwords; in addition to how and why it is created. Jay (2009) conceptualizes that many misperceptions arise due to issues on the frequency and purpose of swearing. He analyzes a set of stabilized data (past 20 years) to see if the 10 words accounts for the majority of public swearing. He found that 80% of those swearing are for extraversion and hostility. Yet, questions pertaining to the use of taboos and its meanings still remained vague. Then, Dewaele (2004) rely his study on data drawn from large web-based questionnaires (t-Tests) of 1039 multilinguals regarding bilingualism and emotions. The results had revealed that majority of L1 speakers curse more in their first language. Rassin & Muris (2005) have also used questionnaires to elicit data from 72 female undergraduate students. His study expands to aggression and life satisfaction to see if the cursing was done because of negative emotions; which led to insignificant results. They also mentioned that swearing is socially dependent. In regards to that, Beers Fägersten (2005) recorded 500 swearing utterances in naturally occurring social settings and conducted 60 questionnaires and 11 interviews in the attempt to understand this swearing phenomena in the identity construction of young adults. She agrees that swearing is a "proprietary linguistic marker of identity", which is generation-bounded. Then, Kaye & Sapolsky (2004) have carried out a study on the hours of exposure of television program on children versus the frequency and types of bad language, only to find that children below 21 hardly utter profanities. She videotaped 133.5 hours of 151 programs for content analysis and her findings are compared to other similar studies (1990, 1994 & 1997) to observe the trend if the use of profanity has increased over the years.
Likewise, previous studies have shown numerous perspectives from social aspects and pragmatics in order to comprehend the nature of bad language. Usually, comparisons between two ethnicities are done in isolation, whereas the rich culture in Malaysia would even influence a single race about the various means of swearing in more than one language, even though the conversation is primarily in English.
Methodology
The theoretical framework of this study is based on Andersson & Trudgill's (1990) theory on bad language. This framework provides insights on the usage of profane language as well as the descriptive aims in perceiving the language from the view of the societies. Thus said, there are many "good reasons" for taking interest in the studies of profanities because the society cares and judges about how one speaks in a vulgar or refined manner.
In this study, the researcher will observe and record conversations of two groups consisting of four professional Chinese women for each group, aged of 20-24 and 25-30 whom are working adults regardless of their professions. The range of participants' age is decided in this study as the researcher's interest to particularly observe the trend of swearing amongst the younger generation of their 20s due to most perceptions (e.g.: Palacios-Martínez, 2010) that younger generation in their teens would swear more. Educational background and professions will be taken into account, since these would function as the independent variable in the study. The researcher chooses groups of friends for psychological reasons; so that they are comfortable and open up in conversations during recording. A sensitive issue (e.g.: politics) will be given as a topic of discussion to spark intensity in conversations. Participants will remain anonymous and the recording session will be conducted with their consent. The researcher will also employ mixed methods in data collection and analysis with one-hour recording of data will be collected and data will be analyzed via 40 minutes of transcription, depending on the richness of data. Tones, intonations, gestures and expressions will also taken note because all these are part of the body language. In other words, observation is also vital in the process of data collection. The rest of the recording (20 minutes) will be monitored for maximum information for group dynamics and background of each participants. The Express Scribe software will be used in the aid of transcribing the recording. Then, the estimated calculation of occurrences (without software) will be grouped into three categories namely: never, sometimes and often. Then, the types of taboos will be coded into categories of mild swearing, sexist, excretory and racist for functional analysis. From this data, we will be able to observe the frequency of usage in the context of Malaysian Chinese working women's conversation to determine their functions of swearing.
