Why the hell are cuss words not included in teaching of Portuguese as foreign language?!

Abstract

This brief study of Brazilian swear words is an attempt to understand the non-inclusion of swear words in the teaching of Portuguese as a foreign language as they are considered as taboo lexicon from the point of view of the institutionalized normative standard language supervised periodically by the Academies. I argue that, since the swear words form a part of the repertoire of popular colloquial vocabulary, they represent the popular culture through their intensity of emotional expression and contextual use. I use the Theory of Lexiculture, proposed by Galisson (1987), and Functional Grammar, by Halliday (2004), to argue that swear words should be introduced through figures of speech such as euphemism and dysphemism, as well as comparisons between swear words of native language of the learner and that of the target language to give the learner a better understanding of the emotional aspect of the language and to foster better pragma-linguistic, socio-pragmatic competence and intercultural competence for the learner of Portuguese as a Foreign Language.

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Original in English