gay lisp
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Particularly within North American English, gay male speech has been the focus of numerous modern stereotypes, as well as
sociolinguistic Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any or all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used, and society's effect on language. It can overlap with the sociology of l ...
studies. Scientific research has uncovered phonetically significant features produced by many gay men and demonstrated that listeners accurately guess speakers'
sexual orientation Sexual orientation is an enduring pattern of romantic or sexual attraction (or a combination of these) to persons of the opposite sex or gender, the same sex or gender, or to both sexes or more than one gender. These attractions are generall ...
at rates greater than chance. Historically, gay male speech characteristics have been highly stigmatized and their usage may be sometimes coded to a limited number of settings outside of the workplace or other public spaces. Research does not support the notion that gay speech entirely adopts feminine speech characteristics – rather, that it selectively adopts some of those features. Gay speech characteristics appear to be learned (rather than innate) ways of speaking, like many aspects of language, though their origins and process of adoption by men remain unclear. One particularly relevant feature is sometimes known as the gay lisp, though researchers confirm that it is not technically a lisp. 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.
Drag queen A drag queen is a person, usually male, who uses drag clothing and makeup to imitate and often exaggerate female gender signifiers and gender roles for entertainment purposes. Historically, drag queens have usually been gay men, and part of ...
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 binary (gay versus straight). Like with other marginalized communities, speech codes can be deeply tied to local, intimate communities to not deny the widespread influence of media depicting gay and trans personas in the vein of ''
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''.


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.Cameron, Deborah, and Don Kulick. 2003. ''Language and Sexuality''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press In older work, speech pathologists often focused on high pitch among men, in its resemblance to women, as a defect. Since the
gay community The LGBT community (also known as the LGBTQ+ community, GLBT community, gay community, or queer community) is a loosely defined grouping of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and other queer individuals united by a common culture and ...
consists of many smaller subcultures, gay male speech does not uniformly fall under a single homogeneous category.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.


Gay "lisp"

What is sometimes colloquially described as a gay "lisp" is one manner of speech associated with gay speakers of North American English, and perhaps other dialects or languages. It involves a marked pronunciation of
sibilant consonant Sibilants are fricative consonants of higher amplitude and pitch, made by directing a stream of air with the tongue towards the teeth. Examples of sibilants are the consonants at the beginning of the English words ''sip'', ''zip'', ''ship'', and ...
s (particularly and ). Speech scientist Benjamin Munson and his colleagues have argued that this is not a mis-articulated (and therefore, not technically a lisp) as much as a hyper-articulated . Specifically, gay men are documented as pronouncing with higher-frequency spectral peaks, an extremely negatively skewed spectrum, and a longer duration than heterosexual men. However, not all gay American men speak with this hyper-articulated Munson, B., & Zimmerman, L.J. (2006b)
Perceptual Bias and the Myth of the 'Gay Lisp'
/ref> (perhaps fewer than half), and some men who identify as heterosexual also produce this feature.


Vowels

A 2006 study of gay men in the Upper Midwestern American dialect region found that they tend to
lower Lower may refer to: *Lower (surname) *Lower Township, New Jersey *Lower Receiver (firearms) *Lower Wick Gloucestershire, England See also *Nizhny Nizhny (russian: Ни́жний; masculine), Nizhnyaya (; feminine), or Nizhneye (russian: Ни́ ...
the vowel (except before a
nasal consonant In phonetics, a nasal, also called a nasal occlusive or nasal stop in contrast with an oral stop or nasalized consonant, is an occlusive consonant produced with a lowered velum, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. The vast major ...
) as well as the vowel. This linguistic phenomenon is normally associated with the
California vowel shift California English (or Californian English) collectively refers to varieties of American English native to California. A distinctive vowel shift was first noted by linguists in the 1980s in southern California and the San Francisco Bay Area of no ...
and also reported in a study of a gay speaker of
California English California English (or Californian English) collectively refers to varieties of American English native to California. A distinctive vowel shift was first noted by linguists in the 1980s in southern California and the San Francisco Bay Area of ...
itself, who strengthened these same features and also fronted the and 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.


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 A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in t ...
sounds, pronunciation of as and as ( affrication), 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.


Perception

In terms of perception, the "gay sound" in North American English is popularly presumed to involve the pronunciation of sibilants (, , ) with noticeable
assibilation In linguistics, assibilation is a sound change resulting in a sibilant consonant. It is a form of spirantization and is commonly the final phase of palatalization. Arabic A characteristic of Mashreqi varieties of Arabic (particularly Lev ...
, sibilation, hissing, or stridency. Frontal, dentalized and negatively skewed articulations of (the aforementioned "gay lisp") are indeed found to be the most powerful perceptual indicators to a listener of a male speaker's sexual orientation, with experiments revealing that such articulations are perceived as "gayer-sounding" and "younger-sounding". 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. However, on the basis of
phonetics Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...
, Benjamin Munson and his colleagues' research has discovered that gay male speech does not simply or categorically imitate female speech. In one Canadian study, listeners correctly identified gay speakers in 62% of cases. 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. The listeners were generally able to correctly identify the
sexual orientation Sexual orientation is an enduring pattern of romantic or sexual attraction (or a combination of these) to persons of the opposite sex or gender, the same sex or gender, or to both sexes or more than one gender. These attractions are generall ...
of the speakers, reflecting the stereotypes. However, there were no statistically significant differences the listeners identified, if they existed at all, based on intonation. These findings are representative of other studies as well. Another study examined the duration of certain sounds (, , and the onset of and ),
frequency Frequency is the number of occurrences of a repeating event per unit of time. It is also occasionally referred to as ''temporal frequency'' for clarity, and is distinct from ''angular frequency''. Frequency is measured in hertz (Hz) which is eq ...
of stressed
vowel A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (leng ...
s, 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.


Other scholars' views

Language and gender 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 lingui ...
scholar
Robin Lakoff Robin Tolmach Lakoff (; born November 27, 1942) is a professor emerita of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Her 1975 book ''Language and Woman's Place'' is often credited for making language and gender a major debate in lin ...
not only compares gay male with female speech but also claims that gay men deliberately imitate the latter,Lakoff, Robin Tolmach. ''Language and Woman's Place''. New York: Oxford UP, 2004. claiming this to include an increased use of superlatives, inflected intonation, and lisping.Lakoff, Robin Tolmach. ''Language and Woman's Place''. New York: Oxford UP, 2004., additional text. 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.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 Linguist
David Crystal David Crystal, (born 6 July 1941) is a British linguist, academic, and prolific author best known for his works on linguistics and the English language. Family Crystal was born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, on 6 July 1941 after his mother had ...
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. Still, research has not confirmed any unique intonation or pitch qualities of gay speech. Some such characteristics have been portrayed as mimicking women's speech and judged as derogatory toward or trivializing of women.


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. Several studies have also examined and confirmed gay speech characteristics in Puerto Rican Spanish and other dialects of
Caribbean Spanish * Caribbean Spanish ( es, español caribeño, ) is the general name of the Spanish dialects spoken in the Caribbean region. The Spanish language was introduced to the Caribbean in 1492 with the voyages of Christopher Columbus. It resembles the ...
.Mack, Sara (2011). "A sociophonetic analysis of /s/ variation in Puerto Rican Spanish". 11th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla.


See also

*
List of fictional gay characters This is a list of gay characters in fiction, i.e. characters that either self-identify as gay or have been identified by outside parties to be gay, becoming part of gay media. Listed characters are either recurring characters, cameos, guest ...
* ''
Do I Sound Gay? ''Do I Sound Gay?'' is a 2014 American documentary film by David Thorpe that explores the existence and accuracy of stereotypes about the speech patterns of gay men,Gaydar Gaydar (a portmanteau of ''gay'' and ''radar'') 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 LG ...
*
LGBT linguistics LGBT linguistics is the study of language as used by members of LGBT communities. Related or synonymous terms include lavender linguistics, advanced by William Leap in the 1990s, which "encompass sa wide range of everyday language practices" ...
* LGBT stereotypes * * Lisp *
Polari Polari () is a form of slang or cant used in Britain and Ireland by some actors, circus and fairground showmen, professional wrestlers, merchant navy sailors, criminals, sex workers and the gay subculture. There is some debate about its origi ...
*
Swish (slang) Swish is a US English slang term for effeminate behavior and interests (camp), emphasized and sanctioned in gay male communities prior to the Stonewall riots. This behaviour is also described as being nelly in British English, and both terms ar ...


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. * * 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. *


External links


Encyclopedia article on "gay speak"



Beyond Lisping: Code Switching and Gay Speech Styles
{{DEFAULTSORT:Gay Lisp Gay effeminacy Human voice LGBT linguistics Sociolinguistics Gender-related stereotypes Stereotypes of men Stereotypes of LGBT people