Insults

Jūratė Ruzaitė, Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania
jurate.ruzaite@vdu.lt

Anna Bączkowska, University of Gdansk, Poland
anna.baczkowska@ug.edu.pl

Insults are words which contain some personal characteristics or behaviour description of the target addressee. For example, they make reference to what the insultee possesses, e.g., beliefs, achievement, bodily features, job, family, etc. They may aim at damaging someone’s reputation by mainly using false statements (calumnies); they may be based on truth by stressing one’s defects (e.g. You’re a cripple) (put downs); or they may exploit the inferior status of the target or encode what no one can believe to be true (e.g. name-calling, abusive invectives, etc.: You son of a bitch). Insults assert dominance, either intentionally claiming superiority or unintentionally revealing lack of regard. Insults may be offensive by the very fact that the speaker’s intention was to offend the target, or it may be sanctioned by their perlocutionary force.

Insults often violate socially accepted norms of politeness and respect; thus, in linguistics, they are often examined from the perspective of Impoliteness Theory, which considers insults to be one type of conventional impoliteness formulae. From a pragmatic perspective, insults are typically seen as face-threatening acts that undermine the hearer’s positive or negative face, either through direct means (e.g. explicit name-calling) or indirect strategies such as irony or sarcasm. The form, frequency, and acceptability of insults vary across cultural and social group contexts. For instance, ritualised or playful insults can serve to reinforce social bonds within peer groups, while in other settings, the same expressions can function as tools of exclusion or domination. In the context of opinion research, insults can reveal underlying power relations, social attitudes, and emotional investments, which makes them a valuable resource for analysing the language of disagreement and hostility, or, more specifically, hate speech. They may appear in isolation or reinforce broader discursive strategies such as dehumanisation, racial criminalisation, and negative stereotyping—particularly in anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Keywords: face-threat, impoliteness, name-calling, hate speech

Related Entries: Hate Speech, Slurs, Vulgarism, Incivility (1), Incivility (2)

References:
Bączkowska, A. (2021). ”You’re too thick to change the station” – Impoliteness, insults and responses to insults on Twitter. Topics in Linguistics, 22(2), 62-84. https://doi.org/10.2478/topling-2021-0011
Culpeper, J. (2011). Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence.
Cambridge University.
Jucker, A., & Taavitsainen, I. (2000). Diachronic speech act analysis: Insults from flyting to flaming. Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 1(1), 67-955.
Milić, I. (2018). What counts as an insult? Acta Analytica, 33, 539-552
Paasch-Colberg, S., Strippel, C., Trebbe, J., & Emmer, M. (2021). From insult to hate speech: Mapping offensive language in German user comments on immigration. Media and Communication, 9(1), 171-180. https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v9i1.3399