Around the world

Fuck around the world

Every language has a word for it and most have a swear built on it. A few are related to fuck; most are not; and in the last fifty years the English word has quietly become everyone's second swear.

The relatives

Fuck's genuine cousins are all Germanic. The pattern, a short vowel between an f and a k, with meanings that cluster around striking, thrusting and breeding, is what persuades etymologists that the family is real.

The Romance languages: one Latin root

French foutre, Spanish joder, Italian fottere, Portuguese foder, Catalan fotre and Romanian fute all descend from the Latin futuere, which the Roman poets Catullus and Martial used freely. Despite the resemblance, futuere is not related to fuck: where Latin has an initial f, Germanic normally has a b, so a true cognate would look more like "buck". The similarity is coincidence. French foutre has largely retired as a verb and survives in je m'en fous (I don't give a fuck) and foutu (fucked, ruined), while the everyday French exclamation is putain, literally "whore". Spanish joder does full duty as verb, exclamation and intensifier, very much as fuck does.

Elsewhere in Europe

• Russian: yebat' (ебать) heads the mat vocabulary, the obscene register that was formally illegal in public performance in Russia from 2014. Blyad' ("whore") does the exclamation job.
• Polish: pierdolić and jebać for the verb; kurwa ("whore") is the all-purpose exclamation and, in fluent speech, punctuation.
• Greek: gamó (γαμώ), which historically meant "to marry".
• Finnish: vittu, literally the female genitals, does exactly what fuck does, with the verb vituttaa ("to piss off") built on it. The Finnish verb for the act, naida, also means "to marry".
• Swedish, Norwegian, Danish: knulla, knulle, kneppe, none related to fuck, and all far less used as swears than the religious oaths fan and jävla.
• Dutch: neuken for the act; but Dutch swearing runs on disease (kanker, tering), which shocks English speakers more than any sexual word.
• Irish and Scottish Gaelic: modern speakers mostly borrow fuck outright. Hiberno-English feck is a separate word, with older senses of stealing and throwing, that now serves as a softened fuck and passes on daytime television.

Beyond Europe

• Arabic: nik (ناك) is the verb; the strongest curses attack the mother or sister rather than using the verb alone.
• Hindi and Urdu: chodna (चोदना), with bhenchod and madarchod (sister-fucker, mother-fucker) as the standard heavy insults.
• Mandarin: cào (肏, usually written 操 or 草), with cào nǐ mā as the direct equivalent of motherfucker. Cantonese uses diu (屌).
• Japanese: has no exact word. Swearing works through rudeness of register rather than taboo vocabulary, and manga and film have simply borrowed fakku (ファック) and fakku yū.
• Turkish: sikmek, with siktir as "fuck off".
• Swahili: kutomba, rarely used as a swear; East African swearing leans on the mother, as elsewhere.

The English word abroad

Through film, music, gaming and the internet, fuck has become a loanword in most of Europe and beyond. Germans say fuck and fucking as interjection and intensifier while keeping ficken for the literal act, so the borrowed word is actually milder for them. Dutch, Scandinavian and Finnish speakers use it similarly, often in places where a native swear would be too strong. Hindi film dialogue, Japanese manga, Brazilian Portuguese and Korean internet slang all carry it. For most non-native speakers it lands with less force than it does for us, which is why a Danish teenager can say it to a grandparent and why English-speaking tourists are regularly startled in Amsterdam.

The reverse is also true. Research on bilinguals consistently finds that swear words in a second language feel weaker than those in the first: a Spanish speaker who learned English at fifteen will find joder shocking and fuck merely rude. The taboo is learned in childhood, with the language, and it does not transfer.

Words that look like fuck and aren't

• Fokker: the Dutch aircraft maker Anthony Fokker. Coincidence, though it caused endless trouble for the film Meet the Parents and its sequel Meet the Fockers, which needed proof that real people bore the name.
• Fuk: the Chinese character for fortune (福) in Cantonese romanisation, which is why Hong Kong has streets and shops with the syllable in the name.
• Phuket: Thai, pronounced roughly "poo-ket".
• Fucking, Austria: named after a man called Focko, and renamed in 2021 anyway. See Places and brands.