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4 hours ago
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An idiot wandering the British Isles is sure to be greeted with a colourful volley of insults, each a signifier of the place in which he finds himself: “divvy” in Merseyside, “pillock” in Leeds or “dinlo” in Portsmouth.
But with parochial phrases increasingly being lost to the homogenisation of the English language, experts are worried that soon, the wandering idiot may just be called an “idiot” wherever he goes.
For this reason, researchers at the University of Sheffield are hoping to preserve regional insults and curses that are localised to towns and cities across the UK. To do so, they’re running the first national census of swearwords.
The project came about after Dr Chris Montgomery was approached by the art project Modern Toss, which wanted to enlist a university to help create a map of British swearwords.
“We’ve got quite a lot of large corpus-based data that allows you to track general swearwords over time from the 1990s to the 2010s,” said Montgomery, a senior lecturer in dialectology and the project lead. “But actually, we don’t know very much about regional swearing at all.
“We haven’t ever had a survey of regional swearing before, we sort of don’t know what’s going on,” he added. “What we know is swearing is really quite productive, it’s useful, it has got a good social function. It serves to indicate when we might be frustrated, but also show social solidarity.
“So we don’t know what is being lost, we don’t know what is disappearing.”
People in towns and cities in Britain are invited to submit their regional swearwords so researchers can preserve a “vivid, honest record” of contemporary speech at a time when regional words and phrases are at risk of vanishing.
The academics are particularly keen to find words specific to particular towns, cities or areas of the UK, which are recognised locally but largely unknown elsewhere, and which often reflect the history and identity of the communities that use them.
Swearwords submitted so far include “arl arse”, an insult common in Liverpool, “bampot”, heard often in Glasgow; and “radgie bastard”, from a contributor in north-east England.
The data will inspire exhibitions across the country, showcasing the reality of how people speak, perhaps even with an interactive map of swearing, where visitors will be able to press a button and hear a swearword from a particular area spoken in the local accent.
Research led by the University of Sheffield found that AI often struggled to understand regional accents and non-standard English. Researchers said there was a need to capture data on regional variations in language to aid the development of technology and ensure regional language was not excluded.
They stressed the project was not about promoting offensive language but, rather, providing an insight into the English language as it was spoken in 2026.
“Some traditional regional dialects might be disappearing, and this project is about celebrating the regional language that people actually use and preserving a record of it, so future generations can get a real insight into people’s lives in 2026 and how people communicated in towns and cities across the country,” Montgomery said.
“Language is changing all the time, and having an insight into taboo language and treating it as a serious research subject, as well as something that obviously brings some humour and some interest more widely, is really important,” he added. “It helps us to understand how language changes, how language evolves and how it’s used for its social function.”
Fellow linguistics academics welcomed the project. Dr Robbie Love, a lecturer in English language at Aston University in Birmingham, said: “To be honest, there’s a lot that we don’t really know about the more localised and regionalised swearing practices, which is why I think this survey or census or map, whatever you want to call it, is really, really welcome.
“There will undoubtedly be a lot of really unique and interesting words that people use across the country that probably don’t get very much attention,” he added.
“There’s an awful lot of variation across society in the way that we use language that directly reflects and reinforces our identity, and of course, regional identity is a really important part of that,” he said. “There is an inherent value in recording and preserving these sorts of practices.”
Love said it was important to destigmatise the non-abusive functions of swearing, adding: “This is not about encouraging rudeness or bad behaviour, but rather celebrating diversity and just acknowledging that swearing is, for a lot of people, a day-to-day part of life.”
