Americans rudest on the internet

Study shows Brits and Aussies come second and third, respectively

Almost two billion words — just under 600 of them swear words — were carefully assessed, and the United States then handed the dubious honour of being the most cursing country in the English-speaking world, at least online.

For the Australian duo behind the research, it came as a surprise that the inhabitants of their own country did not lead the way, such is the stereotype that Aussies are easy-going and relaxed, in actions and words.

But Australians were only the third-most likely citizens to drop a swear word in conversation online.

The reason that America — viewed by some to be a more conservative and polite culture among English-speakers — is the most profane community online may be the anonymity of the screen, according to the study’s co-author Martin Schweinberger, a linguist at the University of Queensland, Australia.

“Especially when you’re not tied to what you write with your name, for example,” said Schweinberger. “There are also cultural differences on what is allowed in social situations.”

“Different cultures have different norms on when and what is permitted. It seems as if the Americans, basically, are more forgiving online,” he said.

Billions of words

Schweinberger and collaborating linguist Kate Burridge evaluated 1.7 billion words used in online news stories, company websites, institutional publications, blogs and other web sources, across 20 English-speaking regions.

From these sources, they created a list of around 600 obscenities, including modified words and abbreviations, like “WTF”, and dozens of variations of the “F” and “C” words and other vulgarities.

They then analysed how frequently those vulgarities appeared in the documents they had found online.

In their results, Americans topped the list with a curse word appearing 0.036 per cent of the time. That is equivalent to 36 curse words in a 100,000-word text.

The British were next, with 25 curses per 100,000 words. Then the Aussies with 22, Singaporeans with 21 and New Zealanders with 20.

Bangladeshis are the politest among English-speakers — just seven vulgarities per 100,000 words.

Polite in the real world

While a broad range of internet sources were used for the study, social media was excluded from the dataset.