Kevin Rudd and State of Origin make Aussies swear like a bunch of sailors

AUSSIES are known for our colourful language, but which of us swear most on social media - and what events trigger it?

IT was a night of victories for Queensland, but Kevin Rudd's return and an Origin win turned the air blue, not maroon, earlier this year.

June 26 will be remembered as the day Mr Rudd completed his three-year campaign of revenge against Julia Gillard to return to the Labor leadership and Queensland got their State of Origin series back on track with a 26-6 win over NSW.

It was also the day Aussies swore their heads off the most - in 140 characters or less.

Typically Australians tweet a swear word fewer than 20 times per minute, but the swearing rate spiked above 100 when Mr Rudd was announced as the winner of the Labor spill and the country's new Prime Minister.

Less than two hours later, Australians were back at it, cursing at a rate of more than 150 tweets per minute in response to the massive State of Origin brawl.

According to a Twitter analysis from Topsy, politics and swearing go hand in hand in Australia - we kind of knew that already from Rudd's expletive-laden rant over Chinese pronunciation leaked on YouTube last year - with federal election day also sparking a barrage of profanity.

As Tony Abbott took power on September 9, profanities were tweeted more than 25,000 times.

And the most foul-fingered on Twitter are South Australians. Overall, 274,000 swearing tweets in the last six months include location data that can be traced to South Australia.

Around the country Queensland trails South Australia narrowly with a curse rate just under 4 per cent, followed by New South Wales, Western Australia, and Victoria, which are all above 3 per cent.

Behind Tasmania at 2.9 per cent, the polite folk of the Australian Capital Territory swore in just 2.5 per cent of tweets.

The Northern Territory comes in last at around 2 per cent, partly due to a low sample size. Just 7000 profanity-laden tweets could be tracked to the Territory in the last six months. Even Tasmania accrued 45,000.

At the other end of the scale, New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland each posted more than one million cuss tweets in the last six months.

Given that the majority of Tweets do not include location information, these volume estimates can be considered conservative.

The tweets collected include different forms of each swear word, but exclude retweets and replies.