Women’s cursing practices in the Lari language

Abstract This paper aims to investigate the structure and pragmatics of cursing expressions in Lari, an endangered language spoken in the south of Iran as well as other countries such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait. This study adopts a descriptive approach in method, and the data were collected through fieldwork among Lari speakers. A total of 450 curses were collected using a prompt-based elicitation method from 30 consultants, who were primarily female monolingual speakers aged 25–85 years. Lari curses were analysed from the pragmatic perspective based on the frameworks of Menuta and Fjeld (2016) and Ljung (2011) as well as according to underlying social categories including age, religion, ethnicity, gender, power and literacy. The findings revealed that curses in Lari are mainly used for ego-cursing (persuasion, congratulation, and condolence), alter-cursing and dual cursing. In addition, the findings regarding the underlying motivations for cursing showed that older female speakers use curses mainly to target younger native Lari speakers of the same religious denomination.