According to a new study published in the Mass Communication and Society journal, the characters who swear the most in young adult novels are rich, beautiful, and popular. There were 40 young adult books from the adolescent bestseller list used in the study.
35 out of the 40 books studied were found to use at least one “swear word.” On average the books were found to have 38 instances of bad language. It would be interesting to know what constitutes bad language.
Sarah Coyne, a professor at Brigham Young University, conducted the study. She stated, “The funny thing about books is that you really don’t know what you’re getting into when you pick one up. I was genuinely surprised by how much profanity some of these books had.”
“The subsequent [truth] that increased profanity within dialogue or first-persona narratives, or third-person familiar narratives, adds to the YA novel, and a kind of challenging that is characteristic of identity formation for all adolescents and young adults, especially in Western culture,” said Schlozman.
Do you think there is more bad language in young adult novels? Do the rich, popular, attractive kids swear more than other characters in books? And if so, what is the reason?