Drawing from Dewaele (2010, 2013), this paper seeks to analyse the socio-pragmatics of swearing in
face-to-face multilingual conversational encounters and argues that the conversational locus (Auer
1984) of playfulness favours, among others, the co-occurrence of slang and code-switching (CS).
Defined by Eble (1996: 11) as an “ever changing set of colloquial words and phrases that speakers use
to establish or reinforce social identity or cohesiveness within a group or with a trend or fashion in
society at large”, slang is more often than not associated with the speech of youngsters seeking to set up
the linguistic boundaries of their in-group. Viewed as a global phenomenon, which is transposed
differently in local contexts by young people hailing from different social, cultural and linguistic
backgrounds – including, as Zimmerman (2009: 121) notes, dialectal and sociolectal backgrounds – it
acts as a marker of symbolic “desire and consciousness of youth alterity”. Such a situation can be
endowed with further sociolinguistic complexity in multilingual situations such as Mauritius, where the
wide range of available languages endows speakers with an equally fertile repertoire of swear words
derived from diverse sources.
In keeping with the above, this paper focuses on a series of multi-party recordings carried out between
October 2011 and March 2012 and analyses the ways in which the usage of swear words in multilingual
contexts can act not only as a reflection of speakers’ communicative competence, but also as an
externalisation of their dynamism and creativity. The use of swear words in conjunction with CS is,
thus, viewed as being a pragmatically consequential conversational act. Such linguistic versatility
appears to be indexical of a reflexive position that youngsters orient themselves to by allowing their
linguistic output to be seen as a performance, “involv[ing] on the part of the performer an assumption
of accountability to an audience for the way in which communication is carried out, above and beyond
its referential content” (Bauman 1975: 293).