A Sociolinguistic study on swear words spoken by the characters in “8 Mile”

ABSTRACT

Swear words are offensive things that relate to many things, usually it is used to insult. They commonly involve the deity, death, madness, sex, excretion, and stranger. For most people, swear words are taboo things that cannot be spoken in public area. Nevertheless, there are some communities that consider those swear words as one way to build harmony, and make those swear words as part of their life style in their daily communication.

Knowing that reality, the researcher feels interested to investigate the phenomena of swear words by the way identifying the following research problems: (1) what are the swear words spoken by the characters in “8 mile” movie? and (2) how are the swear words spoken by the characters in that movie? By identifying these two problems, the researcher hopes that she will able to get knowledge of the types of swear words spoken by the characters in “8 mile” movie and how those swear words are spoken by the characters in that movie.

In conducting this research, the researcher uses a descriptive qualitative research method to analyze the data because the aims of this research is to describe and understand the phenomena of swear words that spoken by the characters in 8 mile movie and also describe how the swear words are spoken by characters in that movie. Since this research is qualitative, then the researcher becomes the key instrument to collect and analyze the data. The data are taken from the “8 mile” movie. Furthermore, in collecting the data, the researcher does several steps. First, she watches the 8 mile movie, Second, she takes a note on the swear words that she finds in the conversation in the movie. Then, she continuous by reducing, from the whole swear words she only analyzes the swear words that is shows friendliness and identity group, not all kind of swear words. After classifying the data, the researcher analyzes how the swear words are spoken in their daily conversation to show friendliness. The last, she makes a conclusion

After analyzing the data, the researcher finds twenty data of swear words that show friendliness and group identity. Those are madness term, sexual term, nationality term, excretion term, and animal terms. In addition, the most dominant type of swear words that is used to show friendliness is madness swear word. Finally, after finishing this research, the researcher hopes that this research can give contribution to the researcher herself, to the readers, and the other further researcher who conduct the same research. Furthermore, the researcher suggests to the next researchers to conduct a more complete research of the same field by investigating another object of swear words.