Gay male speech

Last updated

Gay male speech has been the focus of numerous modern stereotypes, as well as sociolinguistic studies, particularly within North American English. Scientific research has uncovered phonetically significant features produced by many gay men and demonstrated that listeners accurately guess speakers' sexual orientation at rates greater than chance. [1] Historically, gay male speech characteristics have been highly stigmatized, so that such features were often reduced in certain settings, such as the workplace.

Contents

Research does not support the notion that gay speech entirely adopts mainstream feminine speech characteristics — rather, that it selectively adopts some of those features. [2]

There are similarities between gay male speech and the speech of other members within the LGBTQ+ community. Features of lesbian speech have also been confirmed in the 21st century, though they are far less socially noticed than features of gay male speech.[ citation needed ] Drag queen speech is a further topic of research and, while some drag queens may also identify as gay men, a description of their speech styles may not be so gender binary (gay versus straight). [3] Like with other marginalized communities, speech codes can be deeply tied to local, intimate communities and/or subcultures.

North American English

Linguists have attempted to isolate exactly what makes gay men's English distinct from that of other demographics since the early 20th century, typically by contrasting it with straight male speech or comparing it to female speech. [4] In older work, speech pathologists often focused on high pitch among men, in its resemblance to women, as a defect. [5] Since the gay community consists of many smaller subcultures, gay male speech does not uniformly fall under a single homogeneous category. [6]

Gay "lisp"

What is sometimes colloquially described as a gay "lisp" [7] is one manner of speech associated with some homosexual males who speak English, and perhaps other languages too. [8] It involves a marked pronunciation of sibilant consonants (particularly /s/ and /z/ ). [9] [10] Speech scientist Benjamin Munson and his colleagues have argued that this is not a mis-articulated /s/ (and therefore, not technically a lisp) as much as a hyper-articulated /s/. [11] Specifically, gay men are documented as pronouncing /s/ with higher-frequency spectral peaks, an extremely negatively skewed spectrum, and a longer duration than heterosexual men. [12] [13] [14] However, not all gay American men speak with this hyper-articulated /s/ [15] (perhaps fewer than half), [16] and some heterosexual men also produce this feature. [15]

Vowels

A 2006 study of gay men in the Upper Midwestern American dialect region found that they tend to lower the TRAP vowel (except before a nasal consonant) as well as the DRESS vowel. [17] This linguistic phenomenon is normally associated with the California vowel shift and also reported in a study of a gay speaker of California English itself, who strengthened these same features and also fronted the GOOSE and GOAT vowels when speaking with friends more than in other speaking situations. The study suggests that a California regional sound can be employed or intensified by gay American men for stylistic effect, including to evoke a "fun" or "partier" persona. [18]

Other characteristics

Some other speech features are also stereotyped as markers of gay or bisexual males: carefully enunciated pronunciation, wide pitch range (high and rapidly changing pitch), breathy voice, lengthened fricative sounds, [9] pronunciation of /t/ as /ts/ and /d/ as /dz/ (affrication), [19] [4] etc. Research shows that gay speech characteristics include many of the same characteristics other speakers use when attempting to speak with special carefulness or clarity, including over-articulating and expanding the vowel spaces in the mouth. [20]

Perception

In terms of perception, the "gay sound" in North American English is popularly presumed to involve the pronunciation of sibilants (/s/, /z/, /ʃ/) with noticeable assibilation, sibilation, hissing, or stridency. [9] Frontal, dentalized and negatively skewed articulations of /s/ (the aforementioned "gay lisp") are indeed found to be the most powerful perceptual indicators to a listener of a male speaker's sexual orientation, [21] with experiments revealing that such articulations are perceived as "gayer-sounding" and "younger-sounding". [22] So even if a speaker does not display all of these patterns, the stereotype of gay speech and the coordination of other non-linguistic factors, e.g. dress, mannerisms, can help form the perception of these accents in speech.

Gay speech is also widely stereotyped as resembling women's speech. [23] However, on the basis of phonetics, Benjamin Munson and his colleagues' research has discovered that gay male speech does not simply or categorically imitate female speech. [24]

In one Canadian study, listeners correctly identified gay speakers in 62% of cases. [16] A Stanford University experiment analyzed the acoustics of eight males (four straight and four gay), who were recorded reading passages, through the perception of listener-subjects and tasked these listeners with categorizing speakers by adjectives corresponding to common U.S. stereotypes of gay men. [23] The listeners were generally able to correctly identify the sexual orientation of the speakers, reflecting the stereotypes. However, there were no statistically significant differences the listeners identified, if they existed at all, based on intonation. [23] These findings are representative of other studies as well. [25]

Another study [6] examined the duration of certain sounds (/æ/, /eɪ/, and the onset of /s/ and /l/), frequency of stressed vowels, voice-onset time of voiceless aspirated consonants, and the release of word-final stop consonants. The study found some correlation between these speech traits and sexual orientation, but also clarified the study's narrow scope on only certain phonetic features. [6]

Other scholars' views

Language and gender scholar Robin Lakoff not only compares gay male with female speech but also claims that gay men deliberately imitate the latter, [26] claiming this to include an increased use of superlatives, inflected intonation, and lisping. [27] Later linguists have re-evaluated Lakoff's claims and concluded that these characterizations are not consistent for women, instead reflecting stereotypes that may have social meaning and importance but that do not fully capture actual gendered language use. [28]

Linguist David Crystal correlated the use among men of an "effeminate" or "simpering" voice with a widened range of pitch, glissando effects between stressed syllables, greater use of fall-rise and rise-fall tones, vocal breathiness and huskiness, and occasionally more switching to the falsetto register. [29] Still, research has not confirmed any unique intonation or pitch qualities of gay speech. [23] Some such characteristics have been portrayed as mimicking women's speech and judged as derogatory toward or trivializing of women. [30]

Other languages

A study of over 300 Flemish Dutch-speaking Belgian participants, men and women, found a "significantly higher prevalence" of a "lisp"-like feature in gay men than in other demographics. [8] Several studies have also examined and confirmed gay speech characteristics in Puerto Rican Spanish and other dialects of Caribbean Spanish. [31] Despite some similarities in "gay-sounding" speech found cross-linguistically, it is important to note that phonetic features that cue listener perception of "gayness" are likely to be language-dependent and language-specific, and a feature that is attributed to "gayness" in one linguistic variety or language may not have the same indexical meaning in a different linguistic variety or language. For example, a study from 2015 comparing "gay-sounding" speech in German and Italian finds slightly different acoustic cues for the languages, as well as different extents of the correlation of "gay-sounding" speech to gender-atypical-sounding speech. [32]

See also

Related Research Articles

In linguistics, creaky voice refers to a low, scratchy sound that occupies the vocal range below the common vocal register. It is a special kind of phonation in which the arytenoid cartilages in the larynx are drawn together; as a result, the vocal folds are compressed rather tightly, becoming relatively slack and compact. They normally vibrate irregularly at 20–50 pulses per second, about two octaves below the frequency of modal voicing, and the airflow through the glottis is very slow. Although creaky voice may occur with very low pitch, as at the end of a long intonation unit, it can also occur with a higher pitch. All contribute to make a speaker's voice sound creaky or raspy.

In sociolinguistics, an accent is a way of pronouncing a language that is distinctive to a country, area, social class, or individual. An accent may be identified with the locality in which its speakers reside, the socioeconomic status of its speakers, their ethnicity, their caste or social class, or influence from their first language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gaydar</span> Colloquialism for intuitively assessing peoples sexual orientation

Gaydar is a colloquialism referring to the intuitive ability of a person to assess others' sexual orientations as homosexual, bisexual or straight. Gaydar relies on verbal and nonverbal clues and LGBT stereotypes, including a sensitivity to social behaviors and mannerisms like body language, the tone of voice used by a person when speaking, overt rejections of traditional gender roles, a person's occupation, and grooming habits.

Paralanguage, also known as vocalics, is a component of meta-communication that may modify meaning, give nuanced meaning, or convey emotion, by using techniques such as prosody, pitch, volume, intonation, etc. It is sometimes defined as relating to nonphonemic properties only. Paralanguage may be expressed consciously or unconsciously.

The high rising terminal (HRT), also known as rising inflection, upspeak, uptalk, or high rising intonation (HRI), is a feature of some variants of English where declarative sentences can end with a rising pitch similar to that typically found in yes–no questions. HRT has been claimed to be especially common among younger speakers and women, though its exact sociolinguistic implications are an ongoing subject of research.

Baby talk is a type of speech associated with an older person speaking to a child or infant. It is also called caretaker speech, infant-directed speech (IDS), child-directed speech (CDS), child-directed language (CDL), caregiver register, parentese, or motherese.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yuchi language</span> Language of the Yuchi people in the southeastern United States

Yuchi or Euchee is the language of the Tsoyaha, also known as the Yuchi people, now living in Oklahoma. Historically, they lived in what is now known as the southeastern United States, including eastern Tennessee, western Carolinas, northern Georgia, and Alabama, during the period of early European colonization. Many speakers of the Yuchi language became allied with the Muscogee Creek when they migrated into their territory in Georgia and Alabama. They were forcibly relocated with them to Indian Territory in the early 19th century.

In linguistics, prosody is the study of elements of speech that are not individual phonetic segments but which are properties of syllables and larger units of speech, including linguistic functions such as intonation, stress, and rhythm. Such elements are known as suprasegmentals.

Auditory phonetics is the branch of phonetics concerned with the hearing of speech sounds and with speech perception. It thus entails the study of the relationships between speech stimuli and a listener's responses to such stimuli as mediated by mechanisms of the peripheral and central auditory systems, including certain areas of the brain. It is said to compose one of the three main branches of phonetics along with acoustic and articulatory phonetics, though with overlapping methods and questions.

Speech perception is the process by which the sounds of language are heard, interpreted, and understood. The study of speech perception is closely linked to the fields of phonology and phonetics in linguistics and cognitive psychology and perception in psychology. Research in speech perception seeks to understand how human listeners recognize speech sounds and use this information to understand spoken language. Speech perception research has applications in building computer systems that can recognize speech, in improving speech recognition for hearing- and language-impaired listeners, and in foreign-language teaching.

Variation is a characteristic of language: there is more than one way of saying the same thing in a given language. Variation can exist in domains such as pronunciation, lexicon, grammar, and other features. Different communities or individuals speaking the same language may differ from each other in their choices of which of the available linguistic features to use, and how often, and the same speaker may make different choices on different occasions.

Research into the many possible relationships, intersections and tensions between language and gender is diverse. It crosses disciplinary boundaries, and, as a bare minimum, could be said to encompass work notionally housed within applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology, conversation analysis, cultural studies, feminist media studies, feminist psychology, gender studies, interactional sociolinguistics, linguistics, mediated stylistics, sociolinguistics, and feminist language reform and media studies.

The phonology of second languages is different from the phonology of first languages in various ways. The differences are considered to come from general characteristics of second languages, such as slower speech rate, lower proficiency than native speakers, and from the interaction between non-native speakers' first and second languages.

LGBTQ linguistics is the study of language as used by members of LGBTQ communities. Related or synonymous terms include lavender linguistics, advanced by William Leap in the 1990s, which "encompass[es] a wide range of everyday language practices" in LGBTQ communities, and queer linguistics, which refers to the linguistic analysis concerning the effect of heteronormativity on expressing sexual identity through language. The former term derives from the longtime association of the color lavender with LGBTQ communities. "Language", in this context, may refer to any aspect of spoken or written linguistic practices, including speech patterns and pronunciation, use of certain vocabulary, and, in a few cases, an elaborate alternative lexicon such as Polari.

The Japanese language has some words and some grammatical constructions associated with men or boys, while others are associated with women or girls. Such differences are sometimes called "gendered language". In Japanese, speech patterns associated with women are referred to as onna kotoba or joseigo, and those associated with men are referred to as danseigo.

Linguistic profiling is the practice of identifying the social characteristics of an individual based on auditory cues, in particular dialect and accent. The theory was first developed by Professor John Baugh to explain discriminatory practices in the housing market based on the auditory redlining of prospective clientele by housing administrators. Linguistic profiling extends to issues of legal proceedings, employment opportunities, and education. The theory is frequently described as the auditory equivalent of racial profiling. The bulk of the research and evidence in support of the theory pertain to racial and ethnic distinctions, though its applicability holds within racial or ethnic groups, perceived gender and sexual orientation, and in distinguishing location of geographic origin.

In sociolinguistics, a style is a set of linguistic variants with specific social meanings. In this context, social meanings can include group membership, personal attributes, or beliefs. Linguistic variation is at the heart of the concept of linguistic style—without variation, there is no basis for distinguishing social meanings. Variation can occur syntactically, lexically, and phonologically.

Penelope "Penny" Eckert is Albert Ray Lang Professor Emerita of Linguistics at Stanford University. She specializes in variationist sociolinguistics and is the author of several scholarly works on language and gender. She served as the president of the Linguistic Society of America in 2018.

Emotional prosody or affective prosody is the various paralinguistic aspects of language use that convey emotion. It includes an individual's tone of voice in speech that is conveyed through changes in pitch, loudness, timbre, speech rate, and pauses. It can be isolated from semantic information, and interacts with verbal content.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">American Indian English</span> Dialects of the English Language spoken by Native Americans

American Indian English or Native American English is a diverse collection of English dialects spoken by many American Indians and Alaska Natives, notwithstanding indigenous languages also spoken in the United States, of which only a few are in daily use. For the sake of comparison, this article focuses on similarities across varieties of American Indian English that unite it in contrast to a "typical" English variety with standard grammar and a General American accent.

References

  1. ↑ Gaudio, Rudolf P. (1994). "Sounding Gay: Pitch Properties in the Speech of Gay and Straight Men". American Speech. 69 (1): 30–57. doi:10.2307/455948. JSTOR   455948.
  2. ↑ Munson et al., 2006, p. 234.
  3. ↑ Essing (2019). Breaking Away from the Binary. https://www.uni-muenster.de/Ejournals/index.php/satura/article/view/3063
  4. 1 2 Cameron, Deborah, and Don Kulick. 2003. Language and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
  5. ↑ Travis, Lee Edward, ed. Handbook of Speech Pathology. New York: Appleton, 1957.
  6. 1 2 3 Podesva, Robert J., Sarah J. Roberts, and Kathryn Campbell-Kibler. "Sharing Resources and Indexing Meanings in the Production of Gay Styles." Language and Sexuality: Contesting Meaning in Theory and Practice (2001): 175–89.
  7. ↑ Swanson, Ana (2015). "What it means to 'sound gay'". The Washington Post . Archived from the original on January 17, 2016. Retrieved December 22, 2019.
  8. 1 2 Van Borsel, John; De Bruyn, Els; Lefebvre, Evelien; Sokoloff, Anouschka; De Ley, Sophia; Baudonck, Nele (2009). "The prevalence of lisping in gay men". Journal of Communication Disorders. 42 (2): 100–106. doi:10.1016/j.jcomdis.2008.08.004. PMID   18954874.
  9. 1 2 3 Bowen, Caroline (2002). "Beyond Lisping: Code Switching and Gay Speech Styles". Archived from the original on October 27, 2010. Retrieved January 19, 2011.
  10. ↑ McKinstry, Oliver (March 1, 2002). "Queering Multiculturalism". The Mac Weekly. Macalester College. Archived from the original on September 22, 2006. Retrieved January 19, 2011.
  11. ↑ Mack & Munson, 2011, p. 200.
  12. ↑ Munson et al., 2006, p. 204
  13. ↑ Linville, Sue Ellen (1998). "Acoustic Correlates of Perceived versus Actual Sexual Orientation in Men's Speech". Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica. 50 (1): 35–48. doi:10.1159/000021447. PMID   9509737. S2CID   23557815.
  14. ↑ Munson, Benjamin; McDonald, Elizabeth C.; DeBoe, Nancy L.; White, Aubrey R. (2006). "The acoustic and perceptual bases of judgments of women and men's sexual orientation from read speech". Journal of Phonetics. 34 (2): 202–240. doi:10.1016/j.wocn.2005.05.003. S2CID   37781084.
  15. 1 2 Munson, B., & Zimmerman, L.J. (2006b). Perceptual Bias and the Myth of the 'Gay Lisp'
  16. 1 2 Rynor, Micah (February 18, 2002). "Researchers examine patterns in gay speech". News@UofT. University of Toronto. Archived from the original on November 1, 2007. Retrieved January 19, 2011.
  17. ↑ Munson et al., 2006, p. 214-5.
  18. ↑ Podesva, Robert J. (2011). "The California Vowel Shift and Gay Identity". American Speech. 86 (1): 32–51. doi:10.1215/00031283-1277501.
  19. ↑ Wells, John C. (1982). Accents of English. Vol. 1: An Introduction (pp. i–xx, 1–278). Cambridge University Press. ISBN   0-52129719-2 .
  20. ↑ Munson et al., 2006, p. 235.
  21. ↑ Mack & Munson, 2011, p. 209-210.
  22. ↑ Mack & Munson, 2011, abstract.
  23. 1 2 3 4 Gaudio, Rudolf P (1994). "Sounding Gay: Pitch Properties in the Speech of Gay and Straight Men". American Speech. 69 (1): 30–57. doi:10.2307/455948. JSTOR   455948.
  24. ↑ Munson, Benjamin; Babel, Molly (2007). "Loose Lips and Silver Tongues, or, Projecting Sexual Orientation Through Speech". Language and Linguistics Compass. 1 (5): 416–449. doi:10.1111/j.1749-818x.2007.00028.x.
  25. ↑ "Gayspeak". glbtq: an encyclopedia of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, & queer culture. glbtq, inc. 2004. Archived from the original on May 14, 2011. Retrieved January 19, 2011.
  26. ↑ Lakoff, Robin Tolmach. Language and Woman's Place. New York: Oxford UP, 2004.
  27. ↑ Lakoff, Robin Tolmach. Language and Woman's Place. New York: Oxford UP, 2004., additional text.
  28. ↑ Queen, Robin M. "'I Don't Speek Spritch': Locating Lesbian Language". Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender, and Sexuality. Ed. Anna Livia and Kira Hall. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. 233–256
  29. ↑ Crystal, David. English Tone of Voice: Essays in Intonation, Prosody and Paralanguage. London: Edward Arnold, 1975.
  30. ↑ Kulick, Don (2000). "Gay and Lesbian Language". Annual Review of Anthropology. 29: 243–85. doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.29.1.243. S2CID   146726837.
  31. ↑ Mack, Sara (2011). "A sociophonetic analysis of /s/ variation in Puerto Rican Spanish". 11th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla.
  32. ↑ Sulpizio, S.; Fasoli, F.; Paladino, M.; Vespignani, F.; Eyssel, F.; Bentler, D. (July 1, 2015). "The sound of voice: Voice-Based categorization of speakers' sexual orientation within and across languages". PLOS ONE. 10 (7): e0128882. Bibcode:2015PLoSO..1028882S. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0128882 . PMC   4488841 . PMID   26132820.

Further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.