Typology of secret languages and linguistic taboos

In every language there is the possibility for linguistic manipulation, and in every community there exist secret codes and linguistic taboos. Given the world-wide existence and sociocultural importance of secret languages and avoidance registers, it is striking that these phenomena have long been considered relatively marginal by linguists. There are, in spite of literally hundreds of case studies on the phonological, semantic and sociolinguistic aspects of these codes and practices, only very few comparative studies and typological approaches to them. An early attempt to create a typology is Van Gennep's {1908) study, which bases a typology of secret languages on their uses and contexts. More recent typologies concentrate on phonological types of secret codes (Bagemihl 1995), their historical emergence in different functional contexts and modalities (Blake 2010), their social semiotics and ways of use (Storch 2011), and the different manifestations of taboo through manipulation (Allan and Burridge 2006). Senft and Basso (2009) present a systematic discussion and paradigmatic case studies of types of ritual communication and demonstrate the diversity in creating 'ritual communication [as an] artful, performed semiosis, predominantly but not only involving speech, that is formulaic and repetitive and therefore anticipated within particular contexts of social interaction'