Researchers in Australia who compiled a so-called "World Profanity Table" found the United States ranks highest among English-speaking countries for the use of profanity online, with the United Kingdom placing second and Australia third.
The study analysed almost 2 billion words drawn from roughly 1.8 million web pages and blogs across 20 English-speaking countries and identified 597 forms of vulgarity. The researchers reported that, while Americans topped the overall list, British English showed the widest repertoire of milder swear words.
In the ranking reported by the researchers, the top countries were the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, followed by Singapore, New Zealand, Malaysia and Ireland. The study focused on written material collected from public-facing websites and blogs rather than spoken language or private messaging.
The researchers said their work catalogued forms of vulgarity across regional varieties of English and measured their occurrence in large web corpora. The project drew on automated searches and linguistic coding to identify and classify offensive lexical items appearing in online text.
Because the data set was drawn from web pages and blogs, the researchers cautioned that the findings reflect online discourse and the platforms represented in the corpus. Differences in internet use, moderation practices, demographics of online authors, and limits on archive access can affect apparent frequencies of particular words or categories of words, they said.
Linguists have long studied swearing as a linguistic and social phenomenon; the Australian team's work contributes to that literature by providing a comparative, corpus-based snapshot of profanity across varieties of English. The study's catalogue of 597 forms includes both strong and mild vulgarisms and reveals variation in which kinds of terms predominate in different national varieties.
Observers noted that public perceptions of national speech patterns do not always match corpus evidence. For example, the United States is sometimes characterised as more prudish on matters of religion and public decorum, while Australia is often stereotyped for blunt or crude vernacular; the study's rankings do not map neatly onto those stereotypes.
The Australian researchers limited their scope to English-language material and made no claims about multilingual speech communities or private spoken registers. They described the work as a descriptive account of lexical occurrence in a defined online corpus rather than an exhaustive sociolinguistic survey of profanity across all communicative settings.
The study's results were reported in news outlets that covered the rankings and the methodology. The researchers' published data and methods offer a resource for further academic study of profanity, register variation and the ways online communication both reflects and shapes contemporary language use.