Skip to content

Original Research

Frontiers in Language Sciences ·

Volume 5 - 2026 | https://doi.org/10.3389/flang.2026.1879834

Pragmatic multifunctionality of Indonesian swearing in google play app reviews: a mixed-method corpus study

  • Ratna Soraya1
  • Nurlela Nurlela1*corresponding author
  • T. Thyrhaya Zein1
  • Prihantoro2
  • Mulyadi Mulyadi1
  • Mahriyuni Mahriyuni1
  1. 1Department of Linguistics, Universitas Sumatera Utara, Medan, Sumatera Utara, Indonesia
  2. 2Department of Linguistics, Universitas Diponegoro, Semarang, Jawa Tengah, Indonesia
Article metrics0 viewsView details

Abstract

Swearing in digital communication is conventionally viewed as a straightforward marker of offensiveness, but its pragmatic value is systematically reshaped by platform norms, interactional goals, and sociocultural inference, challenging the adequacy of binary offensive-language models. This study adopts a mixed-method corpus-pragmatic design to examine Indonesian swearing in Google Play comments from League of Legends: Wild Rift, Netflix, and X/Twitter, using lexicon-based detection across 500,599 non-empty comments, keyword-in-context interpretation, and contextual coding of six pragmatic categories: cognitive devaluation, animalized reference, corporeal taboo, death/dirt/disgust, moral abuse, and expletive intensification. Indonesian digital swearing performs catharsis, complaint, humor, solidarity, evaluative intensification, and ideological stance-taking, showing it is not reducible to aggression; platform differences are systematic, with gaming reviews foregrounding competence-based blame and cathartic release, streaming reviews concentrating service dissatisfaction and complaint intensification, and social-media reviews mobilizing public stance and identity positioning, while a Cohen's kappa of 0.3858 between lexicon-based and contextual detection confirms that lexical detection alone cannot explain pragmatic force. The study contributes a culturally situated, data-grounded model for interpreting Indonesian digital swearing beyond binary offensive-language classification and offers practical implications for platform-sensitive annotation, sentiment analysis, and content moderation.

Keywords

1 Introduction

The proliferation of digital communication platforms has transformed the conditions under which language is produced, evaluated, and contested. Among the linguistic practices intensified by this transformation, swearing occupies a particularly unstable pragmatic position. It may attack, affiliate, entertain, intensify, resist, or complain, and these functions often emerge simultaneously rather than sequentially. Recent work in interpersonal pragmatics therefore treats swearing not merely as a lexical index of aggression but as a flexible discourse resource whose interpretation depends on target orientation, participation framework, community norms, and inferential context (Stapleton and Beers Fägersten, 2023; Dynel, 2023; Culpeper, 2021).

The present study examines Indonesian swearing in Google Play app reviews across three domains: League of Legends: Wild Rift, Netflix, and X/Twitter. Using reviews as a corpus dataset is common as shown in Prihantoro et al. (2026). The conceptual focus is pragmatic multifunctionality. By this term, the article refers to the capacity of a single swear lexeme to realize multiple, and sometimes contradictory, communicative actions depending on context (Nerlich and Clarke, 2003). This is not a claim that every swearword necessarily acquires a distinct dictionary meaning in each occurrence; rather, it is a claim about context-dependent pragmatic work, such as insulting a teammate, intensifying a service complaint, marking in-group humor, or publicly taking an ideological stance (Holmberg, 2026).

Three theoretical traditions motivate the study. The first is pragmatic research on swearing and impoliteness, which demonstrates that taboo forms can perform expressive, abusive, and idiomatic functions. Andersson and Trudgill's (1990) typology is useful here because expressive swearing releases affect without a necessary target, as in “Damn!”; abusive swearing attacks a target, as in “You stupid idiot!”; and idiomatic swearing is conventionalized, as in “I do not give a damn.” The second tradition is corpus pragmatics, which combines frequency-sensitive evidence with contextual interpretation. The third is platform-affordance theory, which explains how technological environments enable and constrain forms of social action without mechanically determining them (Landert et al., 2023; Hutchby, 2001).

The selection of League of Legends, Netflix, and X/Twitter is theoretically motivated rather than merely convenient. League of Legends represents a competitive gaming ecology in which users evaluate competence, blame teammates or systems, and release frustration through cathartic and regulatory swearing (Schweinberger and Burridge, 2025). Here, cathartic refers to the release of frustration through expletives, whereas regulatory refers to the use of targeted insults to police expected competence or community norms. Netflix represents service-oriented review discourse in which swearing often intensifies dissatisfaction with payment, registration, content availability, censorship, or application performance. X/Twitter represents social-media review discourse in which users comment on access, verification, platform changes, and public identity; swearing can therefore operate as stance-taking, mock solidarity, or ideological evaluation (Sun et al., 2021; Zhao, 2022). These platforms are comparable because all comments are Google Play reviews, yet they are contrastive because each app domain activates different communicative expectations.

Digital-platform affordances further complicate the interpretation of swearing. Anonymity can reduce accountability and intensify directness; asynchronous communication, where participants need not be online simultaneously unlike face-to-face interaction, allows users to compose affectively charged evaluations; rating systems couple textual complaint with numerical judgment; and public visibility encourages stance performance (Sha and Brookes, 2026). For this reason, the same lexeme may be pragmatically reweighted across platforms. For instance, Indonesian tai literally means feces, but in digital comments it can express disgust, as in “This game is tai,” or intensify complaint, as in “Tai, why is this app so slow?”

The study addresses four research questions. First, what categories of Indonesian swearing occur in Google Play user comments across the three platforms? Second, what pragmatic functions do these swearwords perform in context? Third, through what inferential, semantic, graphological, and platform-specific mechanisms are these functions formed? Fourth, what socio-pragmatic and cognitive contextual factors explain cross-platform variation in Indonesian digital swearing?

The practical implications are concrete. A moderation system should not assign the same pragmatic weight to aggressive tolol (stupid/idiot) targeting a teammate and solidarity-marking anjir (an emphatic variant of anjing, used here as a mild exclamation) in an X/Twitter review. App developers can use complaint-intensity patterns, such as corporeal taboo swearing in Netflix reviews, as a signal of severe service dissatisfaction rather than merely as removable toxicity. Sentiment-analysis models likewise require platform-specific lexicons because high-density swearing in League of Legends does not necessarily carry the same sentiment value as lower-density stance swearing on X/Twitter. This asymmetry follows from how each platform normalizes swearing: in League of Legends, taboo language is frequent and routinized as a channel for competence-based blame and cathartic release (Section 3.3), so any single instance carries comparatively diffuse affective weight. On X/Twitter, by contrast, users swear far less often and reserve taboo language for deliberate, marked stance-taking, so each occurrence concentrates greater evaluative and ideological force. Equal or higher swearing density therefore does not translate into equal or higher sentiment intensity across platforms.

The study also responds to persistent annotation challenges. Lexicon-only detection misses pragmatic contrasts, such as anjing (dog) as a direct insult vs. an exclamatory marker. Binary offensive/non-offensive classification fails when swearing simultaneously expresses humor, solidarity, anger, and complaint. Low inter-annotator agreement in offensive-language research further shows that context is not incidental but constitutive of interpretation (Lopez and Kübler, 2025; Leonardelli et al., 2021). The mixed-method design addresses these challenges by triangulating lexicon-based detection, KWIC interpretation, contextual coding, and statistical association tests.

2 Materials and methods

This study employs a mixed-method corpus-pragmatic design to investigate Indonesian swearing in Google Play user comments across League of Legends: Wild Rift, Netflix, and X/Twitter (Kapoor, 2022). The design integrates quantitative corpus profiling with qualitative pragmatic interpretation, enabling the study to identify not only the frequency of swear lexemes but also the communicative actions they perform. The methodological logic is abductive: distributional patterns identify candidate phenomena, while contextual analysis explains how these phenomena become meaningful within platform-specific review ecologies.

The empirical foundation comprises three Google Play user-review datasets. The original filenames are preserved in the research audit trail to support transparency and reproducibility, but the analysis refers to them as the League of Legends dataset, the Netflix dataset, and the X/Twitter dataset. Each entry consistently includes reviewId, userName, score, at (timestamp), and content. Usernames were excluded from analysis outputs and are not reproduced in this article. A comprehensive summary of the temporal coverage and data volume per platform is presented in Table 1.

Table 1. Temporal coverage and data volume of the google play user-review datasets.

PlatformRows loadedEmpty contentParseable datesStart dateEnd date
League of legends141,5801141,5802020-10-272024-08-06
Netflix62,029262,0292013-12-062024-07-10
X/Twitter297,0007297,0002018-01-282024-07-31

The initial combined corpus comprised 500,609 raw rows. While Indonesian POS tagger is available (Prihantoro, 2025), we focus on targeted expressions, where POS tagging and lemmatization are not primary analytic units. After excluding missing content, the final analytical corpus comprised 500,599 non-empty comments. Delimiter normalization was required because the League of Legends file used semicolon delimiters with trailing empty fields. Data cleaning removed non-textual artifacts, HTML tags, and extraneous whitespace, while tokenization used whitespace and punctuation delimiters adjusted for Indonesian digital orthography. Non-standard forms were retained when pragmatically meaningful; for example, anjg, anj, anjir, and njing were treated as variants connected to the animalized-reference family but interpreted contextually rather than automatically equated.

For qualitative analysis, a stratified purposive subsample of 600 swear-containing comments was constructed, with 200 comments per platform. Within each platform, comments were stratified by rating polarity, namely negative reviews of 1–2 stars and non-negative reviews of 3–5 stars, and by the presence of high-frequency swear categories. Random selection within each stratum was conducted using Python's random sampling procedure after filtering for swear lexemes. This procedure ensured that qualitative interpretation did not rely only on the most extreme or most frequent examples.

The lexicon was compiled through four procedures: consultation of prior swearing and impoliteness literature, corpus frequency mining, manual KWIC review of candidate taboo forms, and iterative refinement during pilot coding (Seemann et al., 2023; Kharitonova et al., 2025). Initial coding of 500 comments identified recurrent forms and functions, after which categories were merged, split, or retained according to interpretive clarity and coder self-consistency. The coding scheme therefore combines theory-driven categories with corpus-driven adaptation to Indonesian digital usage. Table 2 summarizes the methodological components, illustrating the integration of corpus linguistics and pragmatic analysis within a mixed-method framework.

Table 2. Summary of methodological design components.

Methodological componentDescriptionTools/ procedures
Data collectionGoogle Play user reviews from three platformsWeb scraping, CSV parsing
Data preprocessingDelimiter normalization, cleaning, tokenizationPython NLP libraries, AntConc
Lexicon-based swear detectionIdentification of swear tokens using curated lexiconCustom lexicon, regex matching
Contextual pragmatic codingManual annotation of pragmatic functions in swear-containing commentsCoding scheme with six binary categories
Qualitative KWIC analysisConcordance analysis of swear lexemes in contextAntConc 4.3.1
Reliability assessmentCohen's kappa, KR-20, Cronbach's alphaStatistical software (R, Python)
Validity assessmentOdds ratio with Haldane-Anscombe correction, chi-square, Spearman's rhoStatistical software (R, Python)
Split-half reliabilityPearson correlation of swear rates between deterministic halvesStatistical software (R, Python)

Digital swearing was operationalized through six non-exclusive binary categories. Each category was coded as present or absent per comment, allowing one comment to contain multiple functions. This treatment of multidimensional pragmatic categories is necessary because Indonesian swearing commonly blends insult, complaint, affective intensification, and stance in the same utterance (Bednarek and Taboada, 2025). To capture this multidimensionality systematically, Table 3 presents the six swearing categories along with their operational definitions and representative examples.

Table 3. Inter-method agreement between lexicon detector and contextual coding (Cohen's Kappa).

UnitCohen's KappaInterpretation
All comments0.3858Moderate agreement; reflects complexity of pragmatic polysemy detection

The moderate kappa value indicates that lexicon-based detection alone is insufficient to capture the full pragmatic range of swearing, necessitating qualitative contextual analysis for accurate interpretation (Leonardelli et al., 2021; Lopez and Kübler, 2025).

Cohen's kappa was used to measure agreement between lexicon-based detection and contextual detection (Saeed et al., 2023). The conventional interpretation used here treats values from 0.00 to 0.20 as slight, 0.21 to 0.40 as fair, 0.41 to 0.60 as moderate, 0.61 to 0.80 as substantial, and 0.81 to 1.00 as almost perfect (Landis and Koch, 1977). The chi-square test assessed the association between swearing, coded as present or absent by lexicon detection, and rating category, coded as negative for 1–2 stars and non-negative for 3–5 stars. Odds ratios were interpreted as evidence of association between swearing and negative ratings, not as standalone validation of the detector. Because multiple platform-level comparisons were performed, results are interpreted conservatively; the corpus size makes small effects statistically detectable, so substantive interpretation prioritizes effect direction, platform contrast, and qualitative triangulation.

KR-20/Cronbach alpha was used cautiously. A low value does not necessarily indicate instrument failure because the six categories were designed to capture a multidimensional construct rather than a unidimensional psychological scale. Split-half reliability assessed whether platform-level swear rates remained stable across deterministic corpus halves. Spearman's rho was used because ratings are ordinal and swear counts are non-normally distributed with many zeros; nevertheless, the results are treated as exploratory rather than definitive.

A replication protocol was maintained through documented preprocessing parameters, an auditable lexicon table, and AntConc settings. KWIC analysis used AntConc 4.3.1 with manual inspection of immediate concordance lines and expanded context where required. The anonymized corpus and analysis scripts are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request, subject to Google Play terms of service and privacy restrictions. A machine-readable version of the lexicon can be produced from Appendix A.

Ethically, the study uses publicly accessible app-review data, anonymizes personal identifiers, and avoids reproducing usernames. The purpose of analysis is linguistic and socio-pragmatic rather than evaluative of individual users. Offensive examples are included only where analytically necessary and are translated to support international readership.

3 Results

3.1 Temporal coverage of the corpus

The temporal span of the corpus differs by platform but is sufficient for comparative corpus-pragmatic analysis. League of Legends comments cover October 27, 2020, to August 6, 2024; Netflix comments cover December 6, 2013, to July 10, 2024; and X/Twitter comments cover January 28, 2018, to July 31, 2024. All datasets contain parseable date metadata for virtually every row, enabling temporal contextualization even though the present article does not claim to provide a full diachronic model of swearing change.

3.2 Validity and reliability of swearing detection instruments

Table 4 presents the validity and reliability evidence. The overall Cohen's kappa is 0.3858, which is best interpreted as fair agreement. This result is analytically important because it demonstrates that lexicon-based detection and contextual pragmatic detection overlap but are not interchangeable. League of Legends reaches moderate agreement, whereas Netflix and X/Twitter remain in the fair range, indicating that service complaints and social-media stance-taking create more ambiguous pragmatic environments for swearing interpretation.

Table 4. Corpus profile by platform: review counts, ratings, token statistics, swearing prevalence, and emphasis markers.

PlatformRaw reviewsNon-empty commentsMean scoreMedian scoreNegative rating %Mean tokensMedian tokensTotal tokensSwear reviewsSwear review %Total swear HitsSwear density (per 1000 tokens)Emphasis %
League of legends141,580141,5793.406536.97910.42561,475,9908,1425.7519,9236.72312.123
Netflix62,02962,0272.746253.6678.2264510,2493,5495.7224,1948.22012.317
X/Twitter297,000296,9933.524532.8835.70721,694,8347,8382.6399,3815.5358.758
Total/Mean500,609500,5993.394536.6177.35333,681,07319,5293.90123,4986.38310.151

The fair kappa value does not weaken the study; rather, it clarifies the object of inquiry. If lexical swearing were pragmatically transparent, lexicon-based and contextual detectors would converge strongly. Their partial divergence instead supports the central claim that Indonesian digital swearing is context-sensitive, multifunctional, and resistant to binary classification.

3.3 Corpus profile and score distribution

The combined corpus contains 500,609 raw reviews and 500,599 non-empty comments after cleaning. Netflix has the lowest mean rating and the highest negative-rating percentage, while League of Legends and X/Twitter show more polarized distributions with many 1-star and 5-star reviews. Swear-review percentages are similar for League of Legends and Netflix, but X/Twitter has a substantially lower percentage, suggesting that social-media reviews may use swearing more selectively for stance and affect rather than as a frequent complaint marker (Schweinberger and Burridge, 2025).

These cross-platform differences in rating patterns and swearing prevalence are summarized in Table 5, which presents the full corpus profile including review counts, token statistics, swearing density, and emphasis marker usage.

Table 5. Distribution of user ratings by platform (counts and percentages).

Platform1 star2 stars3 stars4 stars5 stars
League of legends47,082 (33.25%)5,273 (3.72%)7,218 (5.10%)7,104 (5.02%)74,903 (52.91%)
Netflix30,219 (48.72%)3,070 (4.95%)3,164 (5.10%)3,381 (5.45%)22,195 (35.78%)
X/Twitter85,976 (28.95%)11,687 (3.94%)15,694 (5.28%)28,157 (9.48%)155,486 (52.35%)

Taken together, Tables 5, 6 reveal that Netflix exhibits the highest proportion of negative ratings (53.7%) alongside a moderate swearing prevalence (5.7%), suggesting that user dissatisfaction on app review platforms often coincides with swear use (Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk et al., 2023). League of Legends and X/Twitter, by contrast, show more polarized rating distributions—dominated by both 1-star and 5-star reviews—yet diverge sharply in swearing frequency: LoL users swear nearly twice as often as X/Twitter users despite similar rating patterns. This indicates that swearing is not merely a function of negative sentiment but is shaped by platform-specific communicative norms, with gaming reviews favoring expressive intensity and social media reviews employing swearing more sparingly for targeted stance-taking.

Table 6. Distribution of swearing categories by platform (number and percentage of reviews).

PlatformCategoryReviews (n)Reviews (%)
League of legendsCognitive devaluation2,3901.688
League of legendsAnimalized reference2,0101.420
League of legendsCorporeal taboo1,3070.923
League of legendsDeath/dirt/disgust1,7391.228
League of legendsMoral abuse1800.127
League of legendsExpletive intensifier1,3060.922
NetflixCognitive devaluation8901.435
NetflixAnimalized reference9881.593
NetflixCorporeal taboo1,0191.643
NetflixDeath/dirt/disgust6060.977
NetflixMoral abuse1530.247
NetflixExpletive intensifier2150.347
X/TwitterCognitive devaluation1,6930.570
X/TwitterAnimalized reference2,7570.928
X/TwitterCorporeal taboo1,5430.520
X/TwitterDeath/Dirt/Disgust1,3970.470
X/TwitterMoral abuse3760.127
X/TwitterExpletive intensifier7900.266

3.4 Swearing categories and lexical frequencies

The six-category classification reveals cross-platform regularities and differences. Cognitive devaluation and animalized references are prominent across platforms, but their pragmatic load differs: in League of Legends, they often evaluate competence; in Netflix, they intensify complaint; and in X/Twitter, they may become stance markers or ironic exclamations (Fortuna et al., 2021). Corporeal taboo is proportionally highest in Netflix reviews, where users frequently compress intense service dissatisfaction into short, affect-heavy comments. The cross-platform regularities and differences outlined above are systematically captured in Table 7, which quantifies the distribution of each pragmatic category alongside representative swear words per platform.

Table 7. Top swear lexemes by platform with frequency counts.

PlatformLexeme/variantHits
League of legendstolol1,743
League of legendssampah1,060
League of legendsfak739
League of legendsampas549
League of legendsbabi467
League of legendstai458
League of legendsasu407
League of legendsgila398
League of legendsanjing337
League of legendskontol306
Netflixtolol576
Netflixtai545
Netflixsampah430
Netflixanjing213
Netflixanj195
Netflixkontol178
Netflixasu165
Netflixbabi161
Netflixgoblok128
Netflixgila112
X/Twittertolol1,076
X/Twittersampah955
X/Twittertai658
X/Twitteranjing611
X/Twitteranj520
X/Twitterasu461
X/Twitterbabi402
X/Twitteranjir377
X/Twitterfak313
X/Twitterkontol285

While Table 7 reveals proportional patterns across platforms, Table 8 further refines the analysis by identifying the most frequent swear lexemes per platform with their English translations, thereby bridging category-level trends and lexical-level usage.

Table 8. Validity and reliability evidence for swearing detection instruments.

TestUnitValueInterpretation
Cohen's kappa: lexicon vs. contextual detectorAll comments0.3858Moderate agreement between two operationalizations of swearing-relevant comments.
Cohen's kappa: lexicon vs. contextual detectorLeague of legends0.5091Platform-specific moderate agreement.
Cohen's kappa: lexicon vs. contextual detectorNetflix0.3555Platform-specific moderate agreement.
Cohen's kappa: lexicon vs. contextual detectorX/Twitter0.315Platform-specific moderate agreement.
KR-20/Cronbach alpha: six swearing-category indicatorsAll comments0.1632Low internal consistency; reflects multidimensionality of swearing categories.
Criterion validity: odds ratio for swear presence predicting negative ratingAll platforms8.5262Swearing concentrates in low ratings (χ2 = 18008.66, p < 0.001).
Convergent validity: spearman rho between swear count and star scoreAll platforms−0.1806Negative correlation indicates more swearing with lower ratings (p < 0.001).
Criterion validity: odds ratio for swear presence predicting negative ratingLeague of legends4.3682Swearing concentrates in low ratings (χ2 = 4072.37, p < 0.001).
Convergent validity: spearman rho between swear count and star scoreLeague of legends−0.1621Negative correlation (p < 0.001).
Criterion validity: odds ratio for swear presence predicting negative ratingNetflix14.3039Swearing concentrates in low ratings (χ2 = 2433.38, p < 0.001).
Convergent validity: spearman rho between swear count and star scoreNetflix−0.2048Negative correlation (p < 0.001).
Criterion validity: odds ratio for swear presence predicting negative ratingX/Twitter17.5635Swearing concentrates in low ratings (χ2 = 11453.88, p < 0.001).
Convergent validity: spearman rho between swear count and star scoreX/Twitter−0.1845Negative correlation (p < 0.001).
Split-half reliability: platform-level swear-rate stabilityAll platforms0.9991Very high stability of swear-rate measurement across corpus halves.
Split-half reliability: platform-level swear-rate stabilityLeague of legendsNaNNot applicable within single platform.
Split-half reliability: platform-level swear-rate stabilityNetflixNaNNot applicable within single platform.
Split-half reliability: platform-level swear-rate stabilityX/TwitterNaNNot applicable within single platform.

Building on the lexical and distributional evidence from Tables 7, 8, the findings align with prior studies that situate gaming and evaluative online environments as intensifiers of impoliteness, while app reviews convert user dissatisfaction into condensed affective judgments (Culpeper, 2021; Zhang et al., 2025; Hadi and Fard, 2023). The Indonesian data refine this generalization by showing that the same lexical families are pragmatically redistributed according to app domain. Figure 1 visualizes the distribution of the six swearing categories across the three platforms and makes visible the category-platform interaction that is less immediately apparent in raw frequency tables.

Category heatmap by platform. Source: author's analysis of the three CSV corpora.
Figure 1. Category heatmap by platform. Source: author's analysis of the three CSV corpora.

The heatmap shows that cognitive devaluation and animalized reference dominate League of Legends, while Netflix displays a comparatively stronger corporeal-taboo profile. X/Twitter has lower percentages overall but maintains visible animalized-reference use. The figure therefore supports the argument that pragmatic functions are platform-conditioned rather than uniformly distributed. Figure 2 compares swear-review percentage with swear-token density per 1,000 tokens in order to distinguish prevalence from intensity.

Swearing rate and density by platform. Source: author's analysis of the three Google Play corpora.
Figure 2. Swearing rate and density by platform. Source: author's analysis of the three Google Play corpora.

The comparison shows that Netflix and League of Legends have similar swear-review percentages, yet Netflix has the highest density. This means that Netflix swearing is more concentrated in shorter review texts, which is consistent with service-complaint intensification. X/Twitter has a lower swear-review rate, but its swear density indicates that swearing remains pragmatically salient when it occurs.

3.5 Qualitative KWIC analysis with translations

The KWIC analysis demonstrates that swearing functions as a situated pragmatic resource rather than as a mechanically offensive token (Roy and Biswas, 2024). Translations are provided to make the Indonesian data accessible to international readers. The examples are reproduced as user-generated digital discourse; non-standard spelling is therefore retained where it contributes to pragmatic force. To illustrate how these pragmatic functions manifest across platforms and contexts, Table 9 provides representative KWIC examples with glosses, full English translations, and interpretive commentary.

Table 9. KWIC examples, translations, and pragmatic interpretations.

PlatformIndonesian KWIC Example with GlossEnglish TranslationPragmatic Interpretation
League of LegendsRiot yg kasi org kalo ranked jgn tolol [stupid] kek baru main lah gua dpt teman 2 silver padahal gua udah mau platinum main kek babi [pig] anjingg [dog] kek baru main lol ngotak lah emosi aku ini 3 kali lose streak gara2 teman kek babi njing [dog-related expletive].Riot, when assigning people in ranked, do not give stupid players who play like beginners; I got two silver teammates even though I was almost platinum; they played like pigs and dogs, like beginners; use your brain, I am angry because I lost three times because of teammates like that.This example compresses cognitive devaluation, animalized metaphor, and graphological lengthening. The target is not the platform alone but the competence of co-players, showing how competitive gaming encourages regulatory insults.
League of LegendsGame sampah [trash] matchmaking tolol [stupid] banget!!!Trash game, the matchmaking is extremely stupid!!!The swearwords target both the game system and its implied decision logic. Repeated punctuation amplifies cathartic complaint.
League of LegendsTim gue goblok [idiotic] semua, main ranked kok kayak bot anjir [exclamation].My whole team is idiotic; how can ranked play look like bots, damn.Here anjir functions less as a direct insult than an exclamatory stance marker attached to competence-based blame.
NetflixUdah bayar tapi masih error, aplikasi tai [shit] banget, kontol [vulgar penis] lah pelayanan begini.I already paid but it still errors; this app is really shit; what vulgar service this is.The swearing converts technical service failure into moralized complaint dissatisfaction. The corporeal taboo term intensifies the complaint rather than identifying a literal target.
NetflixFilmnya ilang semua, Netflix makin sampah [trash], anjing [dog] mahal tapi kualitas turun.All the films disappeared; Netflix is getting trashier; damn, it is expensive but the quality is declining.The animalized lexeme works as an intensifier inside a consumer-evaluation frame, linking price and perceived decline.
NetflixBOYCOTT NETFLIX!!! kontennya gila [crazy], bayar mahal tapi dibatasi.BOYCOTT NETFLIX!!! the content policy is crazy; we pay a high price but are restricted.Capitalization and repeated punctuation turn complaint into ideological stance-taking. Swearing supports a collective call to action rather than merely venting anger.
X/TwitterMau lu apaan si anjing [dog]? Akun gw kg bisa masuk terus.What do you want, damn it? I still cannot access my account.The lexeme anjing expresses frustration and helplessness toward a platform access problem. It is pejorative but not directed at a named individual.
X/TwitterAnjir [exclamation], update X makin ribet tapi lucu juga liat orang pada ngamuk.Damn, the X update is getting more complicated, but it is also funny to see people getting angry.Here anjir performs stance and amusement rather than direct aggression, showing why lexicon-only classification would overclassify the comment.
X/TwitterVerifikasi gagal terus, sistem tolol [stupid], akun penting malah kekunci.Verification keeps failing; the system is stupid; an important account is locked instead.Cognitive devaluation targets the platform system. The pragmatic function is complaint escalation, not interpersonal abuse.

Across platforms, three patterns recur. First, swearwords frequently index evaluative stance, but the object of evaluation differs: co-player competence in League of Legends, service failure in Netflix, and access or platform-change frustration in X/Twitter. Second, graphological features such as capitalization, repeated punctuation, and vowel or consonant lengthening operate as pragmatic amplifiers. Third, exceptions are analytically important: anjir and anj may become exclamatory or humorous rather than abusive, which explains why contextual coding diverges from lexicon-based detection.

4 Discussion

4.1 Core findings: types and functions

The results show that Indonesian swearing in Google Play reviews is best understood as pragmatic multifunctionality. The dominant categories, cognitive devaluation and animalized reference, are not merely lexical classes; they are resources for evaluating competence, dramatizing dissatisfaction, negotiating solidarity, and performing public stance. League of Legends foregrounds competence-based blame because the review ecology is tied to competitive play. Netflix foregrounds complaint intensity because users evaluate paid service, content availability, and app performance. X/Twitter foregrounds stance and identity because the reviewed application itself is a social-media infrastructure associated with public discourse.

This finding refines the aggression-centered view of swearing. Swearing is often associated with negative ratings, as the odds ratios show, but the association does not exhaust its pragmatic work. A swearword may be negative in affect while still affiliative in function, as when users share frustration through humorous exclamation. Conversely, a lexeme may appear mild in form but aggressive in context if it targets a user, group, or platform actor directly.

4.2 Mechanisms: how pragmatic multifunctionality emerges

Pragmatic multifunctionality emerges through inferential modulation. A lexeme carries a literal or historically recoverable meaning, but its situated function depends on target, co-text, platform genre, graphology, and shared community expectations. The mechanism can be described as a movement from lexical form to contextual cueing and then to pragmatic uptake (Retta, 2023). Thus, anjing does not automatically mean the same thing in every review; its pragmatic value is constructed through the interpretive relation between word, target, and platform setting.

These cross-platform differences in how anjing shifts from literal meaning to pragmatic function are systematically captured in Table 10, which compares the lexeme across League of Legends, Netflix, and X/Twitter.

Table 10. Inference mechanisms for the lexeme anjing across platforms.

LexemeContextLiteral MeaningPragmatic FunctionInference Mechanism
anjingLeague of Legends teammate criticismdogCognitive devaluationMetaphor: animalization indexes low competence or failed teamwork.
anjingNetflix payment or service complaintdogExpletive intensifierMetonymy: taboo association intensifies anger toward service failure.
anjingX/Twitter ironic or affective stancedogHumor or in-group markerIrony and shared community norms soften direct aggression and foreground stance.

The inferential pathways illustrated in Table 10 show that pragmatic function emerges from the interplay of lexical meaning, contextual cues, and platform norms—a layered process that Figure 3 visualizes as a structured model (Yuliawati et al., 2024; Surahmat et al., 2024). The lexical-semantic layer supplies taboo potential, but pragmatic function is produced only when lexical meaning interacts with platform affordance and socio-cognitive inference (Chae, 2026; Tomlinson, 2026; Rodríguez et al., 2025; Wang et al., 2026; Jumle, 2026; Babatunde et al., 2026). Figure 3 illustrates how interpretation involves lexical-semantic, pragmatic-functional, platform-affordance, and socio-cognitive layers.

Multilayered model of pragmatic multifunctionality in Indonesian digital swearing.
Figure 3. Multilayered model of pragmatic multifunctionality in Indonesian digital swearing.

The model demonstrates that no single layer determines meaning. A swearword becomes an insult, complaint, joke, or solidarity marker only through the interaction of literal association, speaker stance, platform context, and community inference. This layered explanation directly addresses why the same lexeme can produce different pragmatic effects across the corpus.

Graphological strategies further contribute to meaning formation. Capitalization, repeated punctuation, and lengthening such as anjingg or anjirrr function as written substitutes for prosody, intensity, and affect. Code-mixing also expands pragmatic range, especially in forms such as fak, which borrow the affective force of English profanity while being localized through Indonesian orthography.

4.3 Platform affordances as explanatory framework

Platform affordances explain why the same lexicon is unevenly distributed and differently interpreted. The relevant affordances include anonymity, public visibility, asynchronous review posting, star ratings, app-specific complaint norms, and the absence of immediate conversational repair. These affordances do not determine meaning; rather, they condition the kinds of pragmatic action that become salient and recognizable.

Figure 4 maps the three app domains onto their dominant communicative ecologies within the shared environment of Google Play reviews.

Platform affordances shaping Indonesian digital swearing. Source: author's synthesis based on corpus-comparative analysis.
Figure 4. Platform affordances shaping Indonesian digital swearing. Source: author's synthesis based on corpus-comparative analysis.

League of Legends is associated with competitive flaming, competence evaluation, and catharsis (Hadi and Fard, 2023). Netflix is associated with consumer complaint, service dissatisfaction, and ideological critique. X/Twitter is associated with public stance, identity positioning, and ironic commentary. The figure therefore clarifies why the study compares these platforms: they share a review infrastructure while differing in the social actions' users perform through reviews.

Participatory cultures also differ. League of Legends reviews import the interactional logic of competitive play, where blame, expertise, and rank are central. Netflix reviews import the logic of consumer entitlement and service accountability. X/Twitter reviews import a broader social-media repertoire, including public critique, humor, identity display, and collective reaction to platform change (Holmberg, 2026; Sengul, 2025; Zarate et al., 2023). These differences operate at multiple discourse levels: word choice, clause structure, graphological emphasis, interactional sequence, and platform-wide norms.

4.4 Methodological contributions and limitations

Methodologically, the study demonstrates the value of combining large-scale corpus evidence with contextual pragmatic interpretation (Altamimi, 2026). The corpus size supports robust descriptive profiling, while KWIC analysis prevents lexical frequency from being mistaken for pragmatic meaning. The fair overall kappa value is especially instructive because it empirically identifies the boundary of lexicon-only detection. A detector may identify a token, but it cannot reliably determine whether that token attacks, jokes, complains, affiliates, or intensifies without context. Figure 5 summarizes the inference chain from data ingestion to integrated interpretation.

Mixed-method corpus-pragmatic pipeline for detecting and interpreting digital swearing.
Figure 5. Mixed-method corpus-pragmatic pipeline for detecting and interpreting digital swearing.

The pipeline highlights that computational detection is only one stage in the analysis (Liu et al., 2023). Cleaning, lexicon matching, KWIC extraction, contextual coding, reliability assessment, and theoretical interpretation must be treated as mutually checking procedures. This structure also improves replicability because each decision point can be audited.

The limitations are equally important. First, the overall inter-method agreement is fair, not moderate, which confirms the difficulty of annotating pragmatically nuanced swearing. Second, the study relies on a single primary annotator, although self-consistency checks, coding documentation, and KWIC verification mitigate but do not eliminate subjectivity. Third, Google Play comments represent a specific digital genre and should not be generalized uncritically to chat, in-game communication, comment threads, or private messaging. Fourth, the temporal coverage ends in 2024, and platform norms may have shifted since then. Fifth, the statistical analyses follow corpus-linguistic conventions but have not been independently reviewed by a statistician; future work should examine multiple-comparison corrections, alternatives for count data with many ties, and additional robustness checks.

4.5 Theoretical and practical implications

Theoretically, the study contributes to corpus pragmatics by showing how taboo forms become socially meaningful through the interaction of lexical potential, platform affordance, and socio-cognitive inference (Çiftçi, 2025; Ramli et al., 2026; Blake et al., 2026; Palmer, 2026). It also contributes to multilingual offensive-language research by foregrounding Indonesian, a language whose digital swearing practices are shaped by regional forms, orthographic variation, code-mixing, and culturally specific insult systems (Ranasinghe and Zampieri, 2022). Figure 6 places the observed functions on a continuum from low-attack solidarity and intensification to high-attack targeted abuse.

Continuum of pragmatic functions in Indonesian digital swearing.
Figure 6. Continuum of pragmatic functions in Indonesian digital swearing.

The continuum avoids a binary offensive/non-offensive model. It shows that swearing can move gradually from exclamation to complaint, ideological stance, and targeted abuse depending on contextual dependence and attack orientation (Zhang et al., 2025; Cicek et al., 2026). This is particularly relevant for moderation because the same token may fall at different points on the continuum in different contexts.

Practically, the findings suggest that Indonesian content moderation should incorporate platform-sensitive and function-sensitive annotation (Nascimento et al., 2023; Qureshi et al., 2026). A word list can flag candidate comments, but moderation decisions should consider target, stance, rating, graphological intensity, and platform domain (Moreno-Ortiz and García-Gámez, 2025). Sentiment-analysis systems for app reviews should likewise avoid transferring weights from one platform to another: high swear density in gaming reviews may index normative frustration, while similar density in service reviews may indicate severe consumer dissatisfaction. For app developers, swearing patterns can function as diagnostic signals of friction points, especially when clustered around payment, verification, matchmaking, or content access.

5 Conclusion

This study provides preliminary but substantial evidence that Indonesian swearing in Google Play reviews is pragmatically multifunctional. Across 500,599 non-empty comments, swearwords function not only as aggression but also as complaint, catharsis, humor, solidarity, evaluative intensification, and ideological stance-taking. Platform comparison shows that these functions are patterned: League of Legends foregrounds competence-based blame, Netflix foregrounds service dissatisfaction, and X/Twitter foregrounds public stance and identity positioning.

The study's central contribution is not the claim that swearwords always possess multiple dictionary meanings, but that their pragmatic force is contextually negotiated. The fair overall kappa between lexicon-based and contextual detection confirms that lexical identification is necessary but insufficient. Consequently, future Indonesian offensive-language research should combine lexicon resources with contextual annotation, graphological analysis, and platform-sensitive interpretation. Several limitations warrant caution (Ljubešić et al., 2023). The single-annotator design constrains generalizability, the data are restricted to Google Play review discourse, temporal coverage ends in 2024, and the statistical procedures require further robustness testing and independent statistical review. Even with these limitations, the article offers a grounded model for studying Indonesian digital swearing as a culturally situated, platform-conditioned, and inferentially complex discourse practice.

Generative AI statement

The author(s) declared that Generative AI was used in the creation of this manuscript. Generative AI tools were used solely for language editing, grammatical refinement, improving readability, and aligning the manuscript with the journal format. No AI tool was used to generate the research design, collect or analyze data, interpret results, or formulate conclusions. All outputs were critically reviewed, verified, and approved by the author(s), who take full responsibility for the content, accuracy, and integrity of the manuscript.

Any alternative text (alt text) provided alongside figures in this article has been generated by Frontiers with the support of artificial intelligence and reasonable efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, including review by the authors wherever possible. If you identify any issues, please contact us.

Publisher's note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Footnotes

Edited by: John T. Jost, New York University, United States

Reviewed by: Sebastian Sadowski, Radboud University, Netherlands

Claria Dewa Ayu Kadek, Universitas Warmadewa, Indonesia

Statements

Conflict of interest

The author(s) declared that this work was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Funding

The author(s) declared that financial support was not received for this work and/or its publication.

Data availability

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author/s.

Ethics approval

Ethical approval was not required for the study involving humans in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. Written informed consent to participate in this study was not required from the participants or the participants' legal guardians/next of kin in accordance with the national legislation and the institutional requirements.

Author contributions

RS: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Methodology, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. NN: Conceptualization, Data curation, Methodology, Validation, Writing – review & editing. TZ: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Writing – review & editing. P: Conceptualization, Data curation, Investigation, Methodology, Visualization, Writing – review & editing. MuM: Data curation, Supervision, Validation, Writing – review & editing. MaM: Conceptualization, Data curation, Investigation, Methodology, Validation, Writing – review & editing.

Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledges the invaluable guidance and support of the academic supervisors, colleagues, and institutional support from the Universitas Sumatera Utara, whose expertise and encouragement were instrumental throughout the research process.

References

  1. Altamimi S. (2026). Mobilising solidarity in crisis: a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of Wartime online communication. Corpus Pragmat. 10: 22. doi: doi:10.1007/s41701-025-00226-0
  2. Andersson L. G., Trudgill P. (1990). Bad Language. Oxford; Cambridge, Mass: Basil Blackwell, 202
  3. Babatunde S., Temidayo O., Orija J. (2026). Navigating online fandom via impoliteness and politeness strategies in premier league football banter tweets in Nigeria. J. Asian Afr. Stud. 00219096251415519. doi: [Epub ahead of print]. doi:10.1177/00219096251415519.
  4. Bednarek M., Taboada M. (2025). Attitude in reported and non-reported news: a critique of sentiment analysis in corpus pragmatics. Corpus Pragmat. 9, 111 – 133. doi: doi:10.1007/s41701-025-00185-6
  5. Blake A., Carter M., Velloso E. (2026). “Restoration, exploration and transformation: how youth engage character.ai for fun, feels and finding themselves,” in: Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Barcelona: ACM, 1 – 19. doi: doi:10.1145/3772318.3790508
  6. Chae S. W. (2026). Exploring associations among game play, streamer speech, and viewer chat on livestreaming media: a focus on aggressive content. Int. J. Hum. Comput. Interact., 1 – 18. doi: [Epub ahead of print]. doi:10.1080/10447318.2026.2630081.
  7. Cicek M., Yayla S., Kutlubay O. C., Gunasti K. (2026). Unchained expressions: how (de)centralization shapes affective expressions on social media platforms. Eur. J. Mark. 60, 32 – 63. doi: doi:10.1108/EJM-09-2024-0759
  8. Çiftçi H. (2025). Suggestions in digital discourse: the case of MOOC reviews. J. Pragmat. 247, 78 – 88. doi: doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2025.07.016
  9. Culpeper J. (2021). Impoliteness and hate speech: compare and contrast. J. Pragmat. 179, 4 – 11. doi: doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2021.04.019
  10. Dynel M. (2023). Hashtag swearing: pragmatic polysemy and polyfunctionality of #FuckPutin as solidary flaming. J. Pragmat. 209, 108 – 122. doi: doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2023.03.005
  11. Fortuna P., Soler-Company J., Wanner L. (2021). How well do hate speech, toxicity, abusive and offensive language classification models generalize across datasets? Inform. Process. Manage. 58: 102524. doi: doi:10.1016/j.ipm.2021.102524
  12. Hadi M. A., Fard F. H. (2023). Evaluating pre-trained models for user feedback analysis in software engineering: a study on classification of app-reviews. Empir Software Eng. 28: 88. doi: doi:10.1007/s10664-023-10314-x
  13. Holmberg A. J. (2026). Cursing for laughs: the pragmatic functions of swearing in L1 and L2 english stand-up comedy. Corpus Pragmat. 10: 2. doi: doi:10.1007/s41701-025-00212-6
  14. Hutchby I. (2001). Technologies, texts and affordances. Sociology. 35, 441 – 456. doi: doi:10.1177/S0038038501000219
  15. Jumle V. (2026). Sports and nationalism: when imagined communities become national. Nations National. 32, 216 – 232. doi: doi:10.1111/nana.13070
  16. Kapoor S. (2022). “Don't act like a Sati-Savitri!”: hinglish and other impoliteness strategies in Indian YouTube comments. J. Pragmat. 189, 4 – 16. doi: doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2021.12.009
  17. Kharitonova K., Pérez-Fernández D., Gutiérrez-Hernando J., Gutiérrez-Fandiño A., Callejas Z., Griol D.. (2025). EsCorpiusBias: the contextual annotation and transformer-based detection of racism and sexism in spanish dialogue. Future Internet. 17: 340. doi: doi:10.3390/fi17080340
  18. Landert D., Dayter D., Messerli T. C., Locher M. A. (2023). Corpus Pragmatics, 1st Edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi: doi:10.1017/9781009091107
  19. Landis J. R., Koch G. G. (1977). The measurement of observer agreement for categorical data. Biometrics. 33: 159. doi: doi:10.2307/2529310
  20. Leonardelli E., Menini S., Palmero Aprosio A., Guerini M., Tonelli S. (2021). “Agreeing to disagree: annotating offensive language datasets with annotators' disagreement,” in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing Punta Cana: Association for Computational Linguistics, 10528 – 10539. Available online at: (Accessed April 19, 2026).
  21. Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk B., Baczkowska A., Dontcheva-Navrátilová O., Liebeskind C., Valunaite Oleškevičiene G., Žitnik S.. (2023). LLOD schema for Simplified Offensive Language Taxonomy in multilingual detection and applications. Lodz Pap. Pragmat. 19, 301 – 324. doi: doi:10.1515/lpp-2023-0016
  22. Liu J., Dai S., Deng H., Qiu D., Liu L., Li M.. (2023). Evaluation of the prognostic value of the anatomical characteristics of the bony structures in the shoulder in bursal-sided partial-thickness rotator cuff tears. Front Public Health. 11: 1189003. doi: doi:10.3389/fpubh.2023.1189003
  23. Ljubešić N., Mozetič I., Kralj Novak P. (2023). Quantifying the impact of context on the quality of manual hate speech annotation. Nat. Lang. Eng. 29, 1481 – 1494. doi: doi:10.1017/S1351324922000353
  24. Lopez H., Kübler S. (2025). Context in abusive language detection: on the interdependence of context and annotation of user comments. Discourse, Context Media. 63: 100848. doi: doi:10.1016/j.dcm.2024.100848
  25. Moreno-Ortiz A., García-Gámez M. (2025). Corpus annotation of functional discourse units for aspect-based sentiment analysis. Corpus Pragmat. 9, 435 – 461. doi: doi:10.1007/s41701-025-00199-0
  26. Nascimento F. R. S., Cavalcanti G. D. C., Da Costa-Abreu M. (2023). Exploring automatic hate speech detection on social media: a focus on content-based analysis. Sage Open. 13: 21582440231181311. doi: doi:10.1177/21582440231181311
  27. Nerlich B., Clarke D. D. (2003). “Polysemy and flexibility: introduction and overview,” in Polysemy, eds. B. Nerlich, Z. Todd, V. Herman, and D. D. Clarke (Berlin; Boston, MA: De Gruyter Mouton), 3 – 30. doi: doi:10.1515/9783110895698.3
  28. Palmer R. (2026). The agnostic meaning substrate: a theoretical framework for emergent meaning in large language models. Artif. Intell. Appl. doi: [Epub ahead of print]. doi:10.47852/bonviewAIA62027318.
  29. Prihantoro (2025). The creation of the Indonesian TreeTagger for use in LancsBox and CQPweb. Res. Corpus Linguist. 13, 35 – 62. doi: doi:10.32714/ricl.13.02
  30. Prihantoro Yuliawati, S., Rachmat A., Ekawati D. (2026). Koslat-id v. 1.0: The first narrative-annotated corpus of reviews of healthcare facilities in Indonesia. Corpora 21, 67 – 82. doi: doi:10.3366/cor.2026.0355
  31. Qureshi M. D. M., Qureshi M. A., Rashwan W. (2026). Explainable AI for hate speech moderation: a stakeholder-centered and sociotechnical review. WIREs Data Min. Knowl. 16: e70076. doi: doi:10.1002/widm.70076
  32. Ramli W. A. W., Kadir R. A., Amalia A., Choo A. M. (2026). Sentiment and emotion analysis in textual data: a recent systematic literature review method, model and application. IJACSA. 17: 15. doi: doi:10.14569/IJACSA.2026.0170315
  33. Ranasinghe T., Zampieri M. (2022). Multilingual offensive language identification for low-resource languages. ACM Trans. Asian Low-Resour. Lang. Inf. Process. 21, 1 – 13. doi: doi:10.1145/3457610
  34. Retta M. (2023). A pragmatic and discourse analysis of hate words on social media. Internet Pragmat. 6, 197 – 218. doi: doi:10.1075/ip.00096.ret
  35. Rodríguez R., Gorostiza-Cerviño A., Hidalgo-Tenorio E., Moyano M., Maldonado M. A. (2025). Exploring incel discourse through topic modeling: insights from Spanish-speaking contexts on X. Humanit. Soc. Sci. Commun. 13: 94. doi: doi:10.1057/s41599-025-06389-0
  36. Roy G. T., Biswas D. (2024). “Exploring transformer and recurrent neural models for sentiment analysis of mobile app reviews,” in 2024 2nd International Conference on Information and Communication Technology (ICICT) [Internet]. Dhaka: IEEE, 209 – 213. Available online at: (Accessed April 20, 2026).
  37. Saeed R., Afzal H., Rauf S. A., Iltaf N. (2023). Detection of offensive language and ITS severity for low resource language. ACM Trans. Asian Low-Resour Lang. Inf. Process. 22, 1 – 27. doi: doi:10.1145/3580476
  38. Schweinberger M., Burridge K. (2025). Vulgarity in online discourse around the English-speaking world. Lingua. 321: 103946. doi: doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103946
  39. Seemann N., Lee Y. S., Höllig J., Geierhos M. (2023). The problem of varying annotations to identify abusive language in social media content. Nat. Lang. Eng. 29, 1561 – 1585. doi: doi:10.1017/S1351324923000098
  40. Sengul K. (2025). How are far-right online communities using X/Twitter spaces? Discourse, communication, sharing. Discourse Context Media. 65: 100884. doi: doi:10.1016/j.dcm.2025.100884
  41. Sha Y., Brookes G. (2026). Multimodal irony in public responses to digitally mediated NHS COVID-19 messaging. Discourse Context Media. 70: 100976. doi: doi:10.1016/j.dcm.2026.100976
  42. Stapleton K., Beers Fägersten K. (2023). Editorial: swearing and interpersonal pragmatics. J. Pragmat. 218, 147 – 152. doi: doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2023.10.009
  43. Sun Q., Wojcieszak M., Davidson S. (2021). Over-time trends in incivility on social media: evidence from political, non-political, and mixed sub-reddits over eleven years. Front. Polit. Sci. 3: 741605. doi: doi:10.3389/fpos.2021.741605
  44. Surahmat S., Wijana I. D. P., Sulistyowati S. (2024). Marginalization of minority ethnicities in ethnic humor discourse in Indonesia: a critical discourse analysis. Arbitrer. 11, 384 – 398. doi: doi:10.25077/ar.11.3.384-398.2024
  45. Tomlinson C. (2026). Fractured Gaming Cultures: Marginalized Gamers and New Identities. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 140 (Emerging insights into esports). doi: doi:10.5040/9798881896645
  46. Wang Z., Zhu J., Kim D., Zuo W., Yao Z., Chen Y.. (2026). Justice for @birdy: queer counterpublics on Chinese TikTok (Douyin). New Media Soc. 14614448251413683. doi: [Epub ahead of print]. doi:10.1177/14614448251413683.
  47. Yuliawati S., Suganda D., Darmayanti N. A. (2024). Corpus-based study of readers' comments on online news on the policies adopted by the Jakarta Governor during the COVID-19 pandemic. Corpus Pragmat. 8, 29 – 51. doi: doi:10.1007/s41701-023-00155-w
  48. Zarate D., Ball M., Prokofieva M., Kostakos V., Stavropoulos V. (2023). Identifying self-disclosed anxiety on Twitter: a natural language processing approach. Psychiatry Res. 330: 115579. doi: doi:10.1016/j.psychres.2023.115579
  49. Zhang C., Ye P., Li X. (2025). A corpus-based analysis of corporate apologies and public responses on Chinese social media. J. Pragmat. 240, 1 – 17. doi: doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2025.02.008
  50. Zhao X. (2022). Conflictual interactions in CMC: the case of twitter contexts (PhD thesis) (implied) [Internet]. [Ireland] University College Dublin. Available online at: (Accessed April 20, 2026).

Citation

Soraya, R., et al. (2026). Pragmatic multifunctionality of Indonesian swearing in google play app reviews: a mixed-method corpus study. Frontiers in Language Sciences, Volume 5. https://doi.org/
Received
Accepted
Published
Volume
5 - 2026

Copyright

Copyright © 2026 Soraya, Nurlela, Zein, Prihantoro, Mulyadi and Mahriyuni.

License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

*Correspondence: Nurlela Nurlela

Article metrics

Views
0
Downloads
0
Citations
0
Shares
0