Schelden en codewisseling onder tweetaligen in een eentalige samenleving

Abstract

A lot of research has been done into codeswitching among bilinguals in a bilingual society. Also quite a body of research exists into swearing practices. The number of studies into emotion and bilingualism is significantly smaller. With this small qualitative research, I focus on codeswitching in relation to swearing of bilinguals in a monolingual society – Thai-Dutch bilinguals in The Netherlands to be specific. The findings suggest that Thai-Dutch bilinguals, despite being very reluctant to swear (in line with Thai attitudes towards swearing in Thailand), do – on occasion – codeswitch when they start swearing; both when in conversation with people who do not speak Thai, and in conversation with people who do. I suggest that the former is motivated by exclusion – 'the listener knows I'm angry, but doesn't need to know exactly what I say' – and that the latter is motivated by a desire to be more concise; a Thai native speaker would prefer to swear in Thai and does so when possible. The fact that Thai-Dutch bilinguals are very reluctant to swear, and/or are very reluctant to share information about their swearing practises, needs to be stressed here too.