  Languages across the world have words, phrases, and behaviors -- the taboos
-- that are avoided in public communication considering them as obscene or
disturbing to the social, religious, and ethical values of society. However,
people deliberately use these linguistic taboos and other language constructs
to make hurtful, derogatory, and obscene comments. It is nearly impossible to
construct a universal set of offensive or taboo terms because offensiveness is
determined entirely by different factors such as socio-physical setting,
speaker-listener relationship, and word choices. In this paper, we present a
detailed corpus-based study of offensive language in Nepali. We identify and
describe more than 18 different categories of linguistic offenses including
politics, religion, race, and sex. We discuss 12 common euphemisms such as
synonym, metaphor and circumlocution. In addition, we introduce a manually
constructed data set of over 1000 offensive and taboo terms popular among
contemporary speakers. This in-depth study of offensive language and resource
will provide a foundation for several downstream tasks such as offensive
language detection and language learning.
