Gay male speech
Template:Short description Template:Redirect {{ safesubst:#invoke:Unsubst||date=__DATE__ |$B= Template:Ambox }} 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.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> Historically, gay male speech characteristics have been highly stigmatized, so that such features were often reduced in certain settings, such as the workplace.
Research does not support the notion that gay speech entirely adopts mainstream feminine speech Template:Nowraprather, that it selectively adopts some of those features.<ref>Munson et al., 2006, p. 234.</ref> 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.Template: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).<ref>Essing (2019). Breaking Away from the Binary. https://www.uni-muenster.de/Ejournals/index.php/satura/article/view/3063</ref> As 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.<ref name=cam>Cameron, Deborah, and Don Kulick. 2003. Language and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press</ref> In older work, speech pathologists often focused on high pitch among men, in its resemblance to women, as a defect.<ref>Travis, Lee Edward, ed. Handbook of Speech Pathology. New York: Appleton, 1957.</ref> Since the gay community consists of many smaller subcultures, gay male speech does not uniformly fall under a single homogeneous category.<ref name="pod">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.</ref>
Gay "lisp"
Template:Infobox IPAWhat is sometimes colloquially described as a gay "lisp"<ref name="incorrect">Template:Cite news</ref> is one manner of speech associated with some homosexual males who speak English, and perhaps other languages too.<ref name="Van Borsel"/> It involves a marked pronunciation of sibilant consonants (particularly Template:IPAc-en and Template:IPAc-en).<ref name="beyond">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Speech scientist Benjamin Munson and his colleagues have argued that this is not a mis-articulated Template:IPA (and therefore, not technically a lisp) as much as a hyper-articulated Template:IPA.<ref name=":0">Mack & Munson, 2011, p. 200.</ref> Specifically, gay men are documented as pronouncing Template:IPA with higher-frequency spectral peaks, an extremely negatively skewed spectrum, and a longer duration than heterosexual men.<ref>Munson et al., 2006, p. 204</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> However, not all gay American men speak with this hyper-articulated Template:IPA<ref name=munson>Munson, B., & Zimmerman, L.J. (2006b). Perceptual Bias and the Myth of the 'Gay Lisp'</ref> (perhaps fewer than half),<ref name="toronto"/> and some heterosexual men also produce this feature.<ref name=munson/>
Vowels
A 2006 study of gay men in the Upper Midwestern American dialect region found that they tend to lower the Template:Sc2 vowel (except before a nasal consonant) as well as the Template:Sc2 vowel.<ref>Munson et al., 2006, p. 214-5.</ref> 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 Template:Sc and Template:Sc 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.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
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,<ref name="beyond"/> pronunciation of Template:IPA as Template:IPA and Template:IPA as Template:IPA (affrication),<ref>Template:Accents of English</ref><ref name="cam"/> 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.<ref>Munson et al., 2006, p. 235.</ref>
Perception
In terms of perception, the "gay sound" in North American English is popularly presumed to involve the pronunciation of sibilants (Template:IPA, Template:IPA, Template:IPA) with noticeable assibilation, sibilation, hissing, or stridency.<ref name="beyond"/> Frontal, dentalized and negatively skewed articulations of Template:IPA (the aforementioned "gay lisp") are indeed found to be the most powerful perceptual indicators to a listener of a male speaker's sexual orientation,<ref>Mack & Munson, 2011, p. 209-210.</ref> with experiments revealing that such articulations are perceived as "gayer-sounding" and "younger-sounding".<ref>Mack & Munson, 2011, abstract.</ref> 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.<ref name="autogenerated2" /> 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.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
In one Canadian study, listeners correctly identified gay speakers in 62% of cases.<ref name="toronto">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> 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.<ref name="autogenerated2">Template:Cite journal</ref> 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.<ref name="autogenerated2" /> These findings are representative of other studies as well.<ref name=glbtq>Template:Cite encyclopedia</ref>
Another study<ref name="pod" /> examined the duration of certain sounds (Template:IPA, Template:IPA, and the onset of Template:IPA and Template:IPA), 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.<ref name="pod" />
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,<ref name="test">Lakoff, Robin Tolmach. Language and Woman's Place. New York: Oxford UP, 2004.</ref> claiming this to include an increased use of superlatives, inflected intonation, and lisping.<ref name="test2">Lakoff, Robin Tolmach. Language and Woman's Place. New York: Oxford UP, 2004., additional text.</ref> 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.<ref name=queen>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</ref>
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.<ref>Crystal, David. English Tone of Voice: Essays in Intonation, Prosody and Paralanguage. London: Edward Arnold, 1975.</ref> Still, research has not confirmed any unique intonation or pitch qualities of gay speech.<ref name="autogenerated2"/> Some such characteristics have been portrayed as mimicking women's speech and judged as derogatory toward or trivializing of women.<ref name=kul>Template:Cite journal</ref>
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.<ref name="Van Borsel">Template:Cite journal</ref> Several studies have also examined and confirmed gay speech characteristics in Puerto Rican Spanish and other dialects of Caribbean Spanish.<ref>Mack, Sara (2011). "A sociophonetic analysis of /s/ variation in Puerto Rican Spanish". 11th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla.</ref> 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.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
Gay male speech is not uniform across languages and cultures. Acoustic features associated with "gayness" differ by language due to phonetic norms and cultural contexts regarding stereotypes. English listeners tend to associate phonetic features like a fronted /s/<ref name=":0" /> with gay speech in English, as well as in unfamiliar languages including French, German, and Estonian. However, French and German listeners do not relate fronted /s/ with "gayness" or effeminacy in their own languages or others, despite the feature being present in the gay male speech production of these languages.<ref>Template:Cite thesis</ref> The difference is interpreted as follows: while the fronted /s/ is a strong social stereotype in English, it acts more as a "marker" below social awareness in French and German.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> This signifies how stereotypes regarding linguistic features related to sexuality and gay male speech vary culturally, where listeners' unconscious awareness and the attached meaning attributed to being gay are language-specific.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
Gay male speech in the Philippines, more commonly referred to as Gay Lingo, is a combination of English, Filipino, and other languages like the Bicol dialectal schema, with some linguistic adjustments, such as affixation.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> As languages evolve through time, the gay lingo has infiltrated into the common conventional language, with some heterosexual males applying some gay slang into their own vocabulary.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> This shows how, even though words may originate from gay lexicons, they cannot be evidence for stereotyping a person as an absolute gay male if used, since there is a wider audience in the Philippines.
See also
Template:Portal Template:Div col
- List of fictional gay characters
- Do I Sound Gay?
- Gaydar
- LGBT linguistics
- LGBT stereotypes
- Template:Section link
- Lisp
- Polari
- Swish (slang)
References
Further reading
- Crocker, L., & Munson, B. (2006). Speech Characteristics of Gender-Nonconforming Boys. Oral Presentation given at the Conference on New Ways of Analyzing Variation in Language, Columbus, OH.
- Mack, S., & Munson, B. (2008). Implicit Processing, Social Stereotypes, and the 'Gay Lisp'. Oral presentation given at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Chicago, IL.
- Template:Cite journal
- Munson, B., & Zimmerman, L.J. (2006a). The Perception of Sexual Orientation, Masculinity, and Femininity in Formant-Resynthesized Speech. Oral Presentation given at the Conference on New Ways of Analyzing Variation in Language, Columbus, OH.
- Template:Cite journal