A Comparison of the Frequency of Taboos in Political and Religious Lectures in Television

An interesting aspect of sociolinguist investigations is the variation of the codes of conduct that different linguistic communities apply in their use of unfavorable or vulgar words when they talk about certain topics. The present study seeks to compare the usage of verbal taboos in the lectures delivered by political and religious figures. The data were collected from television and internet and the taboos were extracted from the two sets of lectures. The results indicated that both groups made use of taboos in their speeches and in both, the general taboos ranked first in frequency. The significant finding is that political lecturers are more cautious with their words, while their religious counterparts use taboos more freely. In the religious group, general and animal taboos ranked highest and psycho-physical and family taboos ranked lowest. In the political group, however, general taboos ranked highest, and sex and animal taboos ranked lowest