Ameka, Felix K. 2020. “I sh.t in your mouth”: Areal invectives in the Lower Volta Basin (West Africa). In Nico Nassenstein and Anne Storch (Eds.), Swearing and cursing: contexts and practices in a critical linguistic perspective (pp. 121-144). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501511202-006
Abstract:
Languages in the Lower Volta Basin belong to different subgroups of the Kwa family: Gbe, Ga-Dangme, Ghana-Togo Mountain, and Tano, which includes Akanic and Guang languages. These languages share several features, but it is not always easy to detect which features are inherited and which are diffused from one language to the other. Taking a cue from earlier studies, where some widespread interactional
routines are either inherited, such as agoo ‘attention getter’, or diffused from one language, such as ayikoo ‘well done, continue’, which seems to have spread to the other languages from Ga, I investigate some shared maledicta and taboo expressions in the area. I focus on the performance, perlocutionary effect and uptake as well as the cultural scripts that govern the use of two invective multi-modal embodied utterances in the area. One is an emblematic gesture involving a pointed thumb and its accompanying verbal representations. A common
expression that accompanies it comes from the Ga ‘obscene insults’ sɔ́ɔ̀mi! ‘inside female genitalia’, onyɛ sɔ́ɔ̀ mli ‘inside your mother’s genitalia’, whose equivalents are also used in the other languages. The Ewe-based accompanying verbal expression is literally: ‘I defecate in your mouth’. A second form is the one commonly called ‘suck teeth’, which is spread beyond the Lower Volta Basin to the Trans-Atlantic Sprachbund. Drawing on the representation and categorization of how the enactment of these linguistic practices are reported, I demonstrate that they are viewed as insults or ways of swearing at other people because of something bad they may have done to the speaker. I call into question the universality of swearing and argue that crosslinguistic studies of swearing, cursing or cussing and such phenomena should extricate themselves from the English language labels and attend to the insider and indigenous ways of understanding acts of saying bad words to another.
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
