Australia famous for foul mouths

Kevin Rudd has done it on national television, the Broadway musical Avenue Q won Tony awards for it, and celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay can't finish a sentence without it.

It seems swearing is everywhere, with one language expert suggesting Australians have some of the foulest mouths in the world.

The University of Queensland's Roly Sussex, a professor of applied language studies, said that in terms of attitudes to swearing, the US and Australia were on opposite ends of the spectrum, with Britain in the middle.

He pointed to the Prime Minister's dropping of the word "shitstorm" on national television in March as a reflection of Australian mores.

"The sort of words that Mr Rudd has been using in the media are completely unacceptable for President Barack Obama to be using," Professor Sussex said.

"Some people even thought the Prime Minister's use of the S-word in the media made him sound more like an everyday person."

So, too, Tourism Australia's 2006 campaign, "Where the Bloody Hell Are You?"

"That had trouble in England because of the word 'bloody' and it had trouble in Canada because of the word 'hell'," Professor Sussex said. "Neither caused the slightest trouble in Australia."

But on why Australians swear so much, Professor Sussex was not so certain, suggesting that there was a "laid-back" quality to social behaviour in general. "We have become much less church-oriented and that's a definite difference between us and the US."

He said public standards in what was considered vulgar had changed significantly in the past five decades.

"When I was at school in Melbourne in the 1950s, using 'bloody' was terrible and people would get physically punished for it," Professor Sussex said. "Nowadays, you can hear both the F-word and the C-word on Sex and the City."

The South Australian Liberal senator Cory Bernardi who last year chaired a Senate inquiry into swearing on TV, said that while social standards had "dropped enormously" he predicted a conservative backlash.

"Perhaps the low was Gordon Ramsay swearing on his television program," Senator Bernardi said.

The inquiry produced 10 recommendations to the Australian Communications and Media Authority, which is to review the code of practice regulating free-to-air television next year.

The recommendations relate to tightening regulations, modernising the complaints process so that viewers could air their grievances via email rather than written letter alone, and bigger penalties for broadcasters that flout the rules.

- © Fairfax NZ News