Is the Anglosphere also the Swearosphere? 🤬

Data from Spotify suggests that explicit podcasts are far more popular in the English-speaking world

If I’m unhealthily addicted to anything, it’s podcasts. At a guess I listen to about three every day, and if you hacked into the listening history on my phone (please don’t) I expect it would say a lot about me.

So I was delighted when I found this source for Spotify’s podcast data, which I hoped might say a lot about people in general.¹ The data makes a pretty big file, containing details of the top 200 episodes in each of 22 countries for every day since 11 October 2025, along with some older episodes from 2024. It’s a spreadsheet with a million rows, essentially.

I generally don’t approach new data with a particular plan. It’s more fun just to poke around until something…. makes you go… huh? This time that thing was the explicit labels, which in English-speaking countries stand out a fucking mile.

Being British, nothing would make me prouder than seeing my country crowned the sweariest in the developed world. And American friends have told me that they do find Britain quite a sweary place. But the story may not be so simple. It rarely is.

The plot fucking thickens

The data only covers people’s listening habits on Spotify, which I gather is about a third of the market, but which may be an unusual third for some reason. And when it comes to what counts as “explicit”, that’s very much in the ear of the podcaster. They decide which episodes require the label, in a process that Spotify seems not to prescribe or police too closely.

So I suppose the dullest possibility here is that swearing and other forms of mature content are about equally popular around the world, but English-speaking podcasters are more conscientious with their labelling. I can’t really see why that would be, but it is possible.

More likely, I think, is that some countries really are more profane than others. Or at least they like their podcasts that way. That might be a matter of genre, for the most part. News podcasts probably don’t contain much swearing anywhere, but you’d expect comedy shows contain a lot. Maybe the sweary countries just like comedy?

The data doesn’t come with categories, so you can’t just look this up. There are show descriptions though, and forming groups from these should be a fairly easy classification task for an AI. So I fed the text describing all 11,652 into OpenAI’s API platform with a prompt to divide them into News/Politics, Comedy, Sport and Interests. I also gave the AI an “Unsure” category that I told it to use whenever it wasn’t confident. I won’t say it did the job perfectly, but I spot-checked here and there and it looked fine.

At first glance, this does support the idea that comedy is big in the Anglosphere, which accounts for six of the top seven spaces behind Japan.² Except… comedy’s not miles bigger. And there could be plenty of swearing in the other categories. What we really need are the explicit rates within each category. Like so:

That makes it pretty clear to me that just about every kind of podcast is swearier in the English-speaking world. It also unearths a few intriguing details, that I’ll just leave here in some bullet points:

• Why are news/politics podcasts so much more explicit in the US and Colombia?

• Comedy in New Zealand looks markedly less explicit than it is in the rest of the Anglosphere. Is that a thing?

• Do Spanish-speakers roll their eyes at Mexico and its incredibly sweary sports podcasts? I’d love to know.

Mais qu’est-ce qui se passe avec ces putain de chiffres français?

Also seriously, I need to divert this blog for a second to ask: What the merde going on in France? From what little I know about Japanese culture, I’d expect the rather decorous approach to podcasting we see in Japan. But France, which is just over the sea from where I sit, is the least explicit nation of all. Even its most successful 2,338 comedy episodes contain barely any swearing. I briefly lived in France some years ago. French people do swear.

I consulted a friend about this. He spends a lot of time in France, and he wasn’t surprised. It’s not that the French don’t swear, according to him. It’s that swearing in France works differently. French swearwords are generally milder, in simple terms. They don’t land with the kind of impact that they have in English-speaking countries. Although it’s hard to say whether that makes France more profane, or less?

You can see how this plays out in a funny video of the Irish rugby coach Ronan O’Gara speaking French to his La Rochelle team. He speaks capably and confidently, albeit with a strong accent. But several times when he comes to the phrase Je m’en fous—a technically obscene way of saying “I don’t care” based on the verb foutre or “fuck”—it clearly isn’t strong enough for him. So he ends up saying Je m’en fucking fous to get his point across.

If this is how bland French swearwords feel to the French, it might make them less useful, and therefore less used. Or they might simply be so bland that no one needs warning about them. France might be the most linguistically proper society in the world. Or it might just be the most blasé about its swearing.

I thought I’d pulled this thread as far as it would go, but then I remembered French Canadians. They listen to French-language podcasts too, and we do have data on the main language in each episode. I wonder how sweary Canada’s French podcasts are? It’s the same language after all, so I imagine it’s roughly the… Oh.

I’m not sure how to read this. France and Canada listen to a roughly similar mix of French-language podcasts. Maybe Canada’s are a bit less newsy and more comic—although the model often struggled to be sure. But the difference between the frequency of explicit podcasts on their lists is wild.

I look at this and I think, OK, French Canadians listen to less explicit content than Canadians in general, but still a lot more than French-speakers do in France. Indeed if Quebec were independent, it would be the sweariest non-Anglophone country of all. Being surrounded by an English-speaking majority surely has something to do with this? But again, are we looking at a higher sensitivity to swearwords, or a higher use of them? With this data, I don’t think there’s a way to tell.³

Do people just enjoy swearing?

So far I’ve only counted how many explicit episodes appeared on the top-200 lists, because Spotify don’t release actual listener numbers. Still, with a bit of speculative maths, we can have a go at comparing how successful different kinds of podcasts are, within each country. And that might hint at whether explicit shows do unusually well, or unusually badly.

Assuming that the top performers in each chart get vastly more listeners than the lower-ranked shows, I assigned a log-rank score to each episode for each day it appears. The better the rank, the higher the score. The more days an episode makes the list, the more scores get added to its total. This isn’t an actual measure of success, but it should give a reasonable indication of how well each episode did within its country, over the time that the data was collected.

Now, if you compare the average score achieved by clean episodes with the average score for explicit ones, you get an indication of how much better or worse explicit episodes performed.

Correlation does not mean causation, as we all know. So this isn’t necessarily a map of where people most enjoy explicit content. But it might be. And it suggests that in its hunger for profanity, the Anglosphere has company.

In Italy, which now tops the list, explicit podcasts account for less than a tenth of all the episodes in its data. Yet they perform more than twice as well as clean ones. If I were an Italian podcast producer, I’d wonder whether this reveals a big sweary hole in the market. Likewise, the foul-mouthed sports shows in Mexico and news shows in Colombia look like they might point the way for other shows there to follow.

Meanwhile Japan, the Netherlands and yes, France, occupy the bottom places. This makes it hardly a surprise that the podcasts in those countries are rarely explicit, since the explicit ones there are do badly—and very badly in Japan.

I’m not sure whether I’m entitled to call the UK a world-leader in swearing. But I think it’s clear that when people in most places are warned about the content of a show, it doesn’t exactly put them off.

1. Thanks to Daniel Parris for the tip.

2. Does anyone know why comedy podcasts are so big in Japan? Or why sports podcasts aren’t? If so, please tell me. The AI might just be bad at classifying Japanese shows.

3. Swearing does seem to be something people have to wrestle with in Quebec. Canadian regulators have actually ruled that English swearwords can’t be considered offensive when used, as it were, in French. I’ll let better informed readers tell me what the hell is going on there.