Abstract
Swearwords are integral part of every culture, reflecting the social structure, habits and beliefs. We present here our preliminary results of studying Sakha language taboo.
The swearwords seem to reflect the overall situation of Sakha contact: although there is a significant number of recent borrowings from Russian, swearwords and taboo words in general come from other language families as well: Tungusic, Mongolian, Turkic. Many of the domestic Sakha insulting strategies include depicting the object of insult through the quality of sounds, i.e. by using ideophones: ex1: sytyj-a yrbaja-n rot-CONV show_one's_teeth-CONV "(you) are rotten and grinning unpleasantly" Sakha is a culture where situational context for permissible swearing is strongly restricted and speakers therefore often employ code-switching.
When a swearword is eventually integrated into Sakha, we can easily identify that by the phonetic adaptation. Because of the prohibition of swearing in public, Sakha foul language is best researched on the internet.
Our corpus is therefore based primarily on a research on forums and discussions boards and then backed by fieldwork, both by recording of spontaneous speech and by elicitation. The presentation is part of a collective grant project which deals with strategies of adaptation of taboo words by Asian languages.
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