Language and Gender 4 pages

Language and Sexuality

Overview

● Most research that's been done on Language and Sexuality has focused on gay male speech

● A smaller amount on lesbian speech ● Vanishingly little on other groups

– In this lecture we'll touch on non-gender-binary and transgender individuals, but not that much research has been done by linguists (yet)

Gay male speech

● There is common stereotype of gay male speech (the one referenced in the podcast)

● Name some features of that stereotype.

Gay Lisp?

● There's been a lot of ink spilled about the “gay lisp” ● As Munson argues, it's not really a lisp in clinical terms

– A lisp is substituting a th sound for s ● It's a fronting of the tongue during /s/ resulting in a bit

hissier version compared to typical (American) male /s/ sounds

● The “lisp” concept may have originated in the belief that gay men were stunted in their emotional growth – a kind of infantilization (obviously not true)

Other features

● Some gay men exhibit a wider range in pitch variation – Often described as being more “ expressive” – Average pitch not different from other men, though

● Larger vowel space (greater range) ● More frequent use of light-l ● More fronting of /u/ (as in goose) and /o/ (as in goat)

– What did Munson say about this in the podcast?

Other data

● Recent study – Sulpilzio et al. 2015 – Gay and straight men recruited in Germany and

Italy to produce speech samples in each language – Research question:

● Can you identify gay from straight based on their speech in your own language?

● Can you identify gay from straight in another language? ● What features do listeners use to do this?

Other data

● Results – Listeners not very accurate within language or across

language (essentially guessing) – However, listeners are pretty consistent at which voices

they think are gay – This varies by language—the Italians and Germans

disagreed on which voices were gay ● What does this mean?

– At a minimum, what we consider “sounding gay” differs by language (and presumably culture, of course)

Feminine speech?

● Is gay male speech just effeminate male speech?

● Not really. – Some of the features are found in women's speech

more than men's (larger vowel space, larger pitch range)

– But clearly not an attempt to sound “womanly”

Lesbian speech

● Less research, also weaker stereotypes about what lesbians sound like

● If there is a stereotype, it's the opposite of gay male speech—i.e. masculine speech

● Is there evidence for this?

Lesbian speech

● Not much data, but... – Evidence that some lesbians use less standard

language than straight women – More likely to use the local dialect

Transgender speech

● Much of the work here is done by speech pathologists – The goal is to help people transitioning from male to

female sound more “feminine” and female to male sound more “masculine”

● Hormone therapies and surgery can be used to change the overall sound of the voice at the larynx

● Still requires therapy to change performative aspects of the voice

Hijras and Kot(h)is

● Inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent who are born male but identify as female or asexual – Hijras often are ritually castrated – Kotis are rarely castrated

● Both groups wear clothing / accessories that are usually associated with women in India – They may call themselves male, female, or third sex – May or may not have intercourse with cis-hetero males

Hijras and Kot(h)is

● Most of the languages (Hindi is the most common) used by these groups have grammatical gender – but only two: Masculine and Feminine

● Most individuals use feminine gender agreement and feminine pronouns

● Many Kotis use a special code language called Farasi – See, e.g. Polari

Stepping back...

● A general theme of this class is that many (most? All?) of our social categories are expressed in language

● Our attitudes towards those linguistic features and language varieties depends largely on how we evaluate those social categories

● Our attitudes towards language varieties are often a reflection of our attitudes towards those who speak them

Stepping back

● What have you learned in this class? ● What have you shared with peers not in this

class? ● Two more things:

– Thanks to our TAs, Anna and Nate! – Thanks to you for being a wonderful class!