Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn: an exploration into the response of non- British participants to taboos and expletives

In our individual societies it is easy to assume that, as human beings, we know how not to violate social conventions and how to maintain face (Goffman 2005). But what happens when we step outside our closed boundaries of society and explore a wider perimeter of cultures? In my research, I intend to investigate how non-British speakers of English (this will be native English speakers such as American’s or non-native such as Spanish) react when taboo subjects (those which we deem to be not acceptable in day to day conversation such as sex or death in England) and expletives (generally the term for ‘swear words’) are used in conversation with someone they are unfamiliar with. Here the term unfamiliar refers to two participants who have never had spoken interaction. The participants will be aged between 18-28. My planned method is to have a recorded conversation between two participants who are unfamiliar with one another. Participant A will be the same native English speaker in each conversation. They will have had the project explained to them by myself and be aware that their task in the conversation is to use taboo subjects and expletives during the conversation. Participant B will be the non-native British English speaker. They will not know that I am looking specifically at taboos and expletive reactions but will be under the impression that the task is to simply see what interactions take place between two strangers. Whilst an interview style does incur observer’s paradox (a state in which the participants may interact differently because they are aware that they are being observed), making sure participant B does not know the specific subject of the study means I know that they are not going to purposefully changing their answers surrounding taboo and expletives. Theories which I might expect to investigate include face (Goffman 2005), and politeness (Brown and Levinson 1987). From this study, I expect to find that the other participant will not accommodate to the British-English speakers and will not use expletives, because they subconsciously know that these are negative language patterns and not language you would use to an unfamiliar person. I also predict that in the case of taboo subjects the non-British will choose to change the topic if they feel uncomfortable but will not outright say that they dislike the topic because that would be an affront to the British- English speaker face. Why is it interesting to study reactions of others to a British-English speaker? In the journal of politeness research; the pragmatics of swearing (Jay and Janschewitz 2008; 267) it is stated; “offensiveness ratings were shown to depend on gender (for native speakers) and English experience (for non-native speakers)”. I didn’t want to do a gender study as I think this has been explored sufficiently for the moment, but the idea of using different nationalities was intriguing. The ideology behind this project is largely routed in stereotypes. The stereotype that the English are very polite when communicating is one of the reasons that I intend to have a British-English speaker as my Participant A. It will be interesting to discover will happen when the stereotype is not held true, and hopefully, through use of video and sound recordings of the interview style conversations between the two participants I can collect data which will prove my earlier hypothesis true.