Oh, Sh*t! Which Country Swears the Most Online?

From a casual ‘bloody hell’ to a full-throttle F-bomb, swear words are the natural playground for creativity in language, drawing their punch – and perhaps their appeal – from the shock value of the social taboos they touch on. 

But while some countries, like Australia, embrace vulgar language as a quintessential part of national identity, others aren’t always so accepting. A phrase that one country might see as crude, another might find endearing. In this context, studying the use of vulgar language online offers valuable insights into broader cultural values, social attitudes, and how people express themselves in digital spaces.

To explore this further, researchers turned to the breeding ground of vulgar language – the internet – to answer a burning question: Which country swears the most online?

With the help of ARDC-supported research tools, such as the Language Technology and Data Analysis Laboratory (LADAL), the study tapped into large-scale language data to uncover global patterns of swear word use. Amongst the fiery tweets, heated Reddit debates, and scathing blog posts, the most potty-mouthed nation might not be who you think.

Finding Patterns in Profanity 

Published in a special issue of Lingua called ‘Bad Language and Vulgarity Online and in Public Discourse,’ the study, led by Dr Martin Schweinberger from the University of Queensland and Professor Kate Burridge from Monash University, sought to discover which country swears the most on the internet.

To do this, they analysed the Global Web-Based English Corpus (GloWbE), a vast dataset of approximately 1.9 billion words from blogs and web content from 20 English-speaking regions, including the US, UK, Australia, Singapore, India, and more. 

The study used linguistic and computational approaches to analyse the data, the latter of which is not traditionally used in the humanities.

“We’re using computational methods to analyse language and culture in a new way,” said Dr Schweinberger. “Having these computational methods at hand allows us to investigate large amounts of textual data to open up new avenues for research.”

Computer programs helped the researchers screen the GloWbE dataset to identify potentially vulgar language, refine and clean the output to detect creative spellings (like ‘f*ck’ or ‘fkuc’), and remove instances where words were wrongly counted as a swear word (for example, the use of the word ’hoe’ to describe a gardening tool). The researchers then manually cross-checked the data to minimise noise and false positives.

Through statistical analyses, they counted how often vulgar words appeared in the data from each country, compared which swear words were used most in different regions, and analysed how diverse each region was in its use of vulgar language (in other words, how creative it was with its swearing).

Who’s Top of the Leaderboard of Online Obscenities?

The study found that the United States topped the list when it came to the frequency of online swearing, followed by the United Kingdom and Australia. 

“The fact that Australia was not number one was surprising. There’s a paper in the literature that found that half of Australians consider swearing to be part of their culture. I don’t think people in the U.S. would consider swearing to be an integral part of being American citizens, whereas in Australia, a substantive number of speakers would say, ‘Yeah, that’s what we do. That’s what makes us, us,’” said Dr Schweinberger.

However, Dr Schweinberger noted that the findings may also pose certain limitations. For example, Americans may be more comfortable expressing themselves freely on the web, while for others, online language may still be more formal. Alternatively, there may be differences in how people write online compared to how they behave in person. 

Interestingly, while Americans used the highest number of swear words online, Brits and Australians showed more variety in their colourful expressions. 

“I think that the fact the Australians and the British use swearing more creatively is reflective of cultural differences. While Americans swear a lot, they typically stick to the common five swear words – sh*t, f*ck, damn and so on. But with the Australians and British, they show a lot more variability; it’s a lot more playful. You have all these ‘Australian-isms’ for example, like ‘Well, we’re not here to f*ck spiders,” said Dr Schweinberger.

These findings illustrate the important role that culture and society play in how we use language.

Supporting Big Data to Understand Bad Language

This work was conducted using LADAL – free, open-source infrastructure that makes it easy to process, visualise and analyse language data. LADAL is part of the Language Data Commons of Australia (LDaCA), a platform developed by the ARDC’s HASS and Indigenous Research Data Commons, which helps humanities, arts and social science (HASS) researchers use data-driven approaches to research.

“Often, you had people who were interested in using new methods or exploring new pathways, who just couldn’t because the upskilling infrastructure just wasn’t there. The only way around that is to upskill people in computational skills, like basic programming and handling data,” said Dr Schweinberger. “LADAL aimed to fill that gap, to show users how to do things with code and allow people to use data-intensive methods in the humanities. The ARDC has been fantastic in supporting that endeavour.”

From four-letter words to creative keyboard acrobatics, swearing online is a cultural fingerprint that reveals how societal attitudes and language collide. With support from powerful language infrastructure like LADAL, researchers can dive deeper into the fascinating ways that we express ourselves online, one F-bomb at a time. 

Explore data processing, visualisation and analysis tools for HASS research on LADAL. 

Read the journal article: Schweinberger, M., & Burridge, K. (2025). Vulgarity in online discourse around the English-speaking world. Lingua, 321, 103946. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103946 

Read the media release from The University of Queensland, Global study finds Australians are third most prolific swearers.

The ARDC is enabled by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) to support national digital research infrastructure for Australian researchers.