In the following lines, you’ll find a list of curse words British people tend to use. In the end, we’re landing to the UK to repeat some familiar, and some new British English cursing words.Īlthough British English is quite sophisticated, sometimes even they can’t resist saying bloody hell or rubbish. Then we’re off to the Land Down Under with cursing words you definitely want to remember. With more than 1.5 billion speakers worldwide, English is definitely the most popular and spoken language.įrom American English swearing that can be heard in Hollywood movies, we are heading to Canada, and learning Canadian English bad words. However, swear words are a part of every language and they can sometimesĮnglish cursing words have different styles and variants, depending on the country. For a good laugh at Australian English, and the Indian variety, try this series “How to speak Australians”, from the “Dehli Institute of Linguistics”.It’s not polite, that’s for sure. If you think English belongs to Anglos, then you can start by banishing the word “yum cha” from your vocabulary. Speakers of Singapore English, (or “Singlish”) – I count myself as a reasonable speaker of this dialect – will be delighted to see the inclusion of words such as “ang moh” (a light-skinned person of Western origin), “Chinese helicopter” (a derogatory term for a Singaporean whose schooling was conducted in Mandarin Chinese and whose knowledge of English is limited), “killer litter” (objects thrown or falling from high-rise buildings, endangering the people below) and “shiok” (an expression of admiration). The addition of Hong Kong and Singapore English are entirely new. While some of these varieties already had coverage, their presentation has been expanded. This latest OED update includes the publication of written and spoken pronunciations for additional English varieties, including those versions spoken in Australia, Canada, the Carribean, Hong Kong, Ireland, New Zealand, the Phillipines, Scotland, Singapore, Malaysia and South Africia. Thanks to colonization, English is the primary language for countries as diverse as Barbados, Singapore, and Belize. But linguist David Crystal estimates three times as many speak English as an additional language. Somewhere around 400 million people speak English as a native language. We can safely say this figure is very conservative. Since this research is based on the Google Books corpus, the data is only from published books in university libraries. The only estimate I know suggests that well over half the words of English are not recorded by dictionaries. The process for Oxford dictionaries is explained here.Ī dictionary can never hold every word of a language. So how do words get into the dictionary? “Lexicographers” – the folk who make dictionaries – add words only when there is evidence of usage over some period of time, and across various contexts of usage. To the verb “to swear” the OED now includes “sweary”, both as noun (a swear word can be called “a sweary”) and adjective (meaning something or someone characterized by a lot of swearing). For instance, to the verb “exploit,” the OED is adding an adjective (“exploitational”), an adverb (“exploitatively”), and a noun to denote someone who is exploiting someone or something (“exploiter”). Then there are the new forms from old stock. The OED first attests its use right back to 1723. The expression “battle of the sexes”, meanwhile, has only just made it into the dictionary. Frequency of expression ‘budgie smugglers’ in the Global Web-Based English Corpus (GlowBe).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |