“Your mum!” Teenagers’ swearing by mother in English, Spanish and Norwegian* Eli-Marie Danbolt Drange i , Ingrid Kristine Hasund i and Anna-Brita Stenström ii i University of Agder / ii University of Bergen In this article we compare teenagers’ use of swearing by mother (SBM) in three audio-recorded corpora, Te Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT), Corpus Oral de Lenguaje Adolescente de Madrid (COLAm), and Språkkontakt och Ungdomsspråk i Norden (UNO-Oslo). Applying Ljung’s (2011) theoretical framework, we distinguish between ‘ritual insults’ (Your mummy’s got no lips), ‘name-calling’ (You motherfucker), ‘expletive interjec- tions’ (Motherfucker!) and ‘intensifers’ (A motherfucking bastard). Te study showed, as expected, that SBM was more common in the Spanish than in the English data and far exceeded the use in the Norwegian data. Te most com- mon expressions were hijo de puta (“son of a whore”), your mum, and mora di (“your mum”), respectively, while the most frequent pragmatic function of SBM was ‘name-calling’ in Spanish and ‘ritual insults’ in English and Norwegian. A possible reason for the Spanish dominance might be the strong taboo on “whore mother”, as Spain is a Catholic country. Keywords: swearing by mother, contrastive linguistics, English, Spanish, Norwegian International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 19:1 (2014), 29–59. doi 10.1075/ijcl.19.1.02dra ISSN 1384–6655 / e-issn 1569–9811 © John Benjamins Publishing Company * We would like to thank three anonymous reviewers and our colleagues in the research network Swearing in Scandinavia (SwiSca) for comments on earlier drafs of this article.