Academics and lexicographers are exploring how swearing is tied to national cultural identities – and how the internet may cause new, creative cursing to ‘flourish’
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From Kath & Kim’s “pack of shunts” to Colin from Accounts’ call to “Go and trim your fuckin’ hooves for netball, cunt!”, the way Australian TV shows have incorporated creative vulgarities into their dialogue mirrors the way people like to swear – and linguistic researchers say younger generations of Australians in particular see once-taboo profanities as signifiers of cultural identity.
But a fondness for the C word in Australian TV doesn’t make Australians the world’s biggest swearers. Research published in 2025 by linguists Martin Schweinberger of the University of Queensland and Kate Burridge of Monash University showed the nationality that swore the most often online were Americans, followed by the British, with Australians ranking third.
However, Australia’s online swearing came second for breadth and creativity, with Britain topping this “better indicator” showing “richness of repertoire”, Schweinberger says. The Brits topped the list for many finely grained phrases that were “a little bit weird”, he says. “One was ‘knob-gobbler’. I thought, that’s beautiful.”
View image in fullscreenBronson called Ines ‘a cunt’ at the commitment ceremony in Married at First Sight Australia in 2019. The word wasn’t bleeped out. Photograph: Channel Nine“Australians were [also] very creative in the number of forms they use [such as] bloody, crap, idiot, damn. Whereas Americans, when they use vulgarity, they focus on fuck and shit,” he says.
Overall, the British used “cunt” much more than Australians online, according to the study, but importantly the database used statistics collected in 2012 that did not include Australian blogs or social media posts. While Schweinberger agrees “cunt” has “lost its misogynistic meaning in Australia”, he adds: “I wouldn’t be sure about that in the US because they really shy away from it. It’s a very harsh word there.”
Lexicographer Amanda Laugesen, the director and chief editor of the Australian National Dictionary, says popular culture “does help to break down taboos”. “If you are hearing more of that in popular culture or online, it does help to shift the nature of what we think is acceptable.”
Kath & Kim pushed boundaries in 2003 on the ABC when Kim shouted, “Chardonnay, Chardonnay, you pack of shunts” – but by 2019, contestants on Australian versions of The Bachelor and Married at First Sight were uttering the word “cunt” without being censored in the edit.
View image in fullscreenLaugesen predicts Australians’ ‘creativity with swear words’ will continue to ‘flourish’. Photograph: Ashley St George/The Guardian“TV stations were playing on controversy,” Laugesen says. “They made a big deal about it in the commercials that somebody was going to say this word.”
Laugesen is about to release a second edition of Rooted: An Australian History of Bad Language, noting that since the book’s first publication in 2020 evidence has emerged of “young [Australian] people identifying the amelioration of the C word and the creative uses of the C word as being particularly Australian, which is fascinating”, citing the example of the portmanteau “shitcunt” for a particularly bad person.
Laugesen is referring to a 2025 thesis by Monash University PhD philosophy student Dylan Swayne Hughes which used online survey data and recorded commentary from 49 students and seven teachers across three Victorian high schools. In it, Hughes writes: “For some participants, cunt even seems to have undergone a process of enregisterment, becoming evaluated as a significant part of Australian culture and identity.”
“Some of the older feminists I’ve spoken to still felt that was a misogynistic word,” Laugesen says. “But as with many words, that baggage and meaning shifts across time, so it’s lost that kind of cultural meaning or even people thinking of it as a bodily descriptor. Now it’s really just an insult.”
Laugesen sees our broader use of swearing as a “performance of Australianness” arising from Australians’ self-perception as “more informal” and “anti-authority” compared to other predominantly English-speaking countries. Emerging from convicts, bushmen and “Digger” soldiers in the first world war, vulgar vernacular is celebrated in Australia today in phrases such as “I’m not here to fuck spiders” (meaning, “I don’t have time to waste”) or “cunning as a shithouse rat”, she says.
“Language is very much tied to ideas of Australian identity in a way that you wouldn’t say, I think, of the US or the UK,” she says. “There’s an argument to say, what else does Australia have in terms of an idea around itself, around the Australian character and Australian values? Language is one of those things we use to make up an idea of what is Australian.”
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WTF? Americans and Britons swear more than Australians online, research findsRead moreIn 2027, Schweinberger and Burridge plan to publish new research drawn from the international corpus of English global linguistics project, which will show that among 14 English-speaking countries, New Zealanders swear most frequently face to face, closely followed by Ireland and Australia, with the UK and US behind at fifth and sixth.
Burridge says social swearing – in person – is a form of “verbal cuddling”, rooted in Australians’ love of banter and informality. “The main function of swearing is as a solidarity marker,” she says, noting the British-born Australian journalist Richard Twopeny’s observation in his 1883 book Town Life in Australia: “The lower-class colonial swears as naturally as he talks.”
View image in fullscreenKath & Kim pushed boundaries in 2003 on the ABC with ‘Chardonnay, Chardonnay, you pack of shunts’. Photograph: Netflix“The English-speaking world is also becoming a lot more laid back now so there’s a blurring between public and private boundaries,” says Burridge. “But the lines have always been blurry in Australia.”
Laugesen predicts Australians’ “creativity with swear words will likely continue to flourish”, with school students now seeing “racist, sexist and homophobic slurs as much more taboo than traditional swear words”.
Social media “has become even more toxic”, however, with more abuse allowed by tech companies as free speech in the 2020s, with a lack of government regulation allowing “people to say pretty much anything online”.
View image in fullscreenBut Laugesen says she would be “loathe to censor bad language”, noting taboos around swearing “have been used to close down voices and stop people from speaking out or challenging authorities”. She cites, as one example, the offensive language crimes that remain on the books in Australia, which are “disproportionately targeting Indigenous Australians”.
“The history of bad language has been entwined with what it has meant, and means to be, Australian,” she says.
“But all too often this has been defined along white, masculine lines. This is not to say we should reject our swearing reputation, but … we might want to think about what that says – and what we want it to say – about our values and identity.”
Rooted: An Australian History of Bad Language by Amanda Laugesen is published by NewSouth in Australia, $34.99