“May Bread Run and You Run After It”: The Function of Cursing in Persian

This study sought to investigate the function of cursing as a speech act in Persian and uncap its underlying social and cultural principles. An open Discourse Completion Test (DCT) of eight situations along with focused and individual interviews were used to collect the data from the 90 males and females participated in the study. The females were found to use cursing utterances more often than males. Less educated people used cursing utterances more frequently than more educated ones. The other strategies used by these participants were swearing, advising, and blaming oneself, in the educated ones, and praying and asking God for help among the uneducated.