36.1719, FYI: STAL Seminar: JUNE 9, 14:30 CET: Gerhard Van Huyssteen, "Taboo Language and Language Change: Current Knowledge"

Tue Jun 3 01:05:02 UTC 2025

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-1719. Tue Jun 03 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.1719, FYI: STAL Seminar: JUNE 9, 14:30 CET: Gerhard Van Huyssteen, "Taboo Language and Language Change: Current Knowledge"

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Date: 02-Jun-2025
From: Dan Zeman [danczeman at gmail.com]
Subject: STAL Seminar: JUNE 9, 14:30 CET: Gerhard Van Huyssteen, "Taboo Language and Language Change: Current Knowledge"

The Slurring Terms Across Languages (STAL) network
(https://sites.google.com/view/stalnetwork/home) invites you to a talk
by Gerhard Van Huyssteen (North-West University) entitled "Taboo
Language and Language Change: Current Knowledge". The talk will take
place online on JUNE 9, 14:30-16:00 Central European Time (CET) and is
part of the of STAL network seminar series
(https://sites.google.com/view/stalnetwork/seminar). If you want to
participate, please write to stalnetwork at gmail.com for the Zoom link.
Below you can find the abstract.
All welcome!
ABSTRACT:
That words and their meanings are naturally unstable and subject to
change, is a well-established and largely undisputed fact in
modern-day linguistics. However, despite “… the volatile nature of the
vocabulary surrounding taboos …” (Burridge and Benczes 2019, 183)
being a glaringly obvious study object for historical linguistics, “…
it has been only relatively recently that the effects of taboo on
language development have made an appearance in the mainstream
linguistics literature … [Until recently], [d]iscussions of taboo,
even within historical linguistic textbooks, focused on remote
examples involving ancient naming rituals and taboos on dangerous
animals.” (Burridge and Benczes 2019, 198) . This sentiment is echoed
by several other scholars, among them Burridge (2012, 88) (who refers
to it as “a striking example of scholarly squeamishness”), Van der
Sijs (2002, 524-526), and Zenner, Ruette, and Devriendt (2017, 107).
It is especially in language contact situations where the interaction
of general language and taboo language is easily noticeable:
swearwords are borrowed generously between languages in language
contact situations. For example, Van der Sijs (2002, 524-526) shows
that roundabout half of the 45 Dutch maledicta that she studied, were
loanwords or derivations of such loans. The general explanation for
this phenomenon is that loan maledicta make the expression of negative
emotions and attitudes more acceptable for conversational participants
(Van Sterkenburg 2001, 77), since swearing in one’s first language is
“perceived to have a stronger emotional resonance” (Dewaele 2012,
595).
In this presentation, the central research question will be: Given our
existing knowledge base of language change, and more specifically
lexical semantic change, what do we currently know about the change of
taboo words and constructions?
We will firstly aim to give a succinct but comprehensive overview of
existing literature on taboo language and language change, drawing on
the handful of publications on this topic, among others Allan (2001),
Allan and Burridge (1991, 2006), Andersen (2014), Beelen and Van der
Sijs (2022), Borkowska and Kleparski (2007), Burridge (2006), Burridge
and Benczes (2019), McWhorter (2021), Traugott (2010, 2017),
López-Couso (2010), Van der Sijs (2002, 2007), and Zenner, Ruette, and
Devriendt (2017). From the literature, some existing theses will be
defined and illustrated with examples from Dutch, English, and
Afrikaans, and their respectives language contact situations.
Secondly, we will present a case study as testing grounds for the
general (hypo)theses about taboo language and language change, viz. on
Dutch as donor language. We will show patterns of Dutch taboo
loanwords in languages across the globe, but specifically also in
languages spoken in former colonies of the Netherlands. This analysis
will be based on a dataset extracted from Van der Sijs’ Nederlandse
woorden wereldwijd [Dutch words worldwide] (NWWW 2010).

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics
                     General Linguistics
                     Philosophy of Language

Subject Language(s): Afrikaans (afr)
                     Dutch (nld)
                     English (eng)

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