Profanity on Jordan’s Twitter

Abstract

This study discusses how profanity is used online and whether it records any gender-related differences. It explores how often and why certain swear words are used on Jordan’s Twitter. The data are harvested by a computer specialist and consist of 5,000 English tweets—2,500 by females and 2,500 by males. The tweets were posted from Jordan within the period 2015-2020 and were randomly selected from 500 different accounts. The study concluded that the most common swear words on Jordan’s Twitter were fuck, shit, damn and hell, and that there is statistical evidence that women swear more than men, contrary to several previous studies. Women also tend to use a greater variety of swear words, often mitigating their effect through abbreviated forms. The study also attributed the high frequency of the swear words found in the data to their syntactic flexibility, mother-tongue interference, and the fact that most of these words are closed monosyllables.