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The use of taboo words represents one of the most common and arguably universal linguistic behaviors, fulfilling a wide range of psychological and social functions. However, in the scientific literature, taboo language is poorly characterized, and how it is realized in different languages and populations remains largely unexplored. Here we provide a database of taboo words, collected from different linguistic communities (Study 1, N = 1046), along with their speaker-centered semantic characterization (Study 2, N = 455 for each of six rating dimensions), covering 13 languages and 17 countries from all five permanently inhabited continents. Our results show that, in all languages, taboo words are mainly characterized by extremely low valence and high arousal, and very low written frequency. However, a significant amount of cross-country variability in words’ tabooness and offensiveness proves the importance of community-specific sociocultural knowledge in the study of taboo language.

This paper presents efforts to evaluate the representativeness of the Setswana corpus data with measures that are independent of corpora. Two frequency measures were used: one sourced via a subjective frequency rating survey and another from a corpus of Setswana. Strong correlations (r =.75; p<.001) between survey ratings and corpus frequencies suggest that the corpus reflects native speaker intuitions. In addition, the study tested for frequency effects using an unprimed visual lexical decision task where participants had to judge whether a letter string on a screen is an existing word or a made-up non-word. In the analysis of reaction times, survey ratings and corpus frequencies were found to have similar correlations with reaction times, although survey ratings provided a better fit. Our study therefore makes a methodological contribution as results illustrate that in the absence of established corpus databases, participant intuitions can be used in linguistic research. This observation concurs with previous research on European languages that found that native speakers can reliably estimate the frequencies of words.

This paper presents efforts to evaluate the representativeness of the Setswana corpus data with measures that are independent of corpora. Two frequency measures were used: one sourced via a subjective frequency rating survey and another from a corpus of Setswana. Strong correlations (r =.75; p<.001) between survey ratings and corpus frequencies suggest that the corpus reflects native speaker intuitions. In addition, the study tested for frequency effects using an unprimed visual lexical decision task where participants had to judge whether a letter string on a screen is an existing word or a made-up non-word. In the analysis of reaction times, survey ratings and corpus frequencies were found to have similar correlations with reaction times, although survey ratings provided a better fit. Our study therefore makes a methodological contribution as results illustrate that in the absence of established corpus databases, participant intuitions can be used in linguistic research. This observation concurs with previous research on European languages that found that native speakers can reliably estimate the frequencies of words.