A STUDY OF TABOO TERMS IN THE COMMUNICATION IN THE SOCIAL MEDI
الخلاصة
Taboo is a term refers to something forbidden or unacceptable according to the norms and conventions of societies or religion. Taboo is a linguistic phenomenon which is found in all languages around the world. It is represented by using the prohibited words in speech or writing. Such words are used by people for many various reasons depending on the background and education of the speaker.
One of the areas in which such words are used are the social media such as facebook, twitter, YouTube, etc. One can notice taboo words in the posts, video content or comments.
This study concentrates on the use of taboo words in the comments of YouTube. It investigates the nature of such phenomenon linguistically and tries to justify the possible reasons behind such a problem.
It is hypothesized that:
- Taboo words compose a rate of 25% of the comments of YouTube.
- Such words are used because of anger, sadness and the influence of other people.
In order to investigate the hypotheses above, this study focuses on analyzing five samples chosen from YouTube which include clips of famous movies as well as interviews.
This study presents many important results about the use of taboo words. Among these results are the following important ones:
- Taboo words compose a rate of 5% of the comments of YouTube.
- There are four main reasons for using these words which are:
a- Expressing an opinion in a negative way.
b- expressing a state of anger.
c- repeating the actors' words.
d- expressing an opinion in a positive way.
Finally, this study ends with drawing some relevant conclusions based on the results above.