A comparative study of the euphemism in Chinese and Spanish

This paper presents the results from a comparison of euphemism across Chinese and Spanish. We analyzed the concept of euphemism, the areas of use and its formulation at different linguistic levels (phonetic, semantic, morphological and syntactic). We found similarities and differences in the usage of euphemism between the two languages. We propose various factors that give rise to the similarities and, more importantly, the factors underlying the dissimilarities, which include linguistic elements, religion, hierarchical structure of society, moral values, way of life and aesthetic factors.