Researchers from Aston University have found that the use of swear words in Britain have declined by more than a quarter since the 1990s. Dr Robbie Love, based in the College of Business and Social Sciences, looked at how swearing changed in casual British English conversation between 1994 and 2014.
As part of the study, which is published in Text & Talk: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language, Discourse & Communication Studies, Dr Love used two large bodies of transcriptions to analyse the use of language, including: The Spoken British National Corpus gathered in 1994 and the same corpus from 2014. Both texts include over 15 million words, although it was found that swear words accounted for less than 1 per cent.
In total, the amount of swearing was found to have fallen by 27.6 per cent, from 1,822 words per million in 1994 to 1,320 words per million in 2014.The research findings also suggest that the word 'f***' has been overtaken 'b***dy' as the most popular curse word in the UK.
In the study, Dr Love compared the use of 16 of the nation's most common swear words, including p***, c*** and s**g, from the 1990s to the 2010s.
He also found that trends in the type of swear words used have changed over the last few decades , with 'b****y' being the most common curse word in the 1990s and 'f***' taking precedent in the 2010s.
The analysis suggests that this is largely down to a big decline in the use of 'b****y',while 'f***' has remained relatively steady over the years. It was also found to be the second most commonly used swear word in 1994, followed by s**t, p***, b****r and c**p.
Other key findings of the study included:
