Lbian and Gay Male Language Use: A Cril Review of the Lerature on JSTOR

Contents:

• POLARI: THE LANGUAGE GAY MEN ED TO SURVIVE
• A GAY PAPER: WHY SHOULD SOCLGUISTICS BOTHER WH SEMANTICS?
• GAYDAR—SENDG MIXED SIGNALS
• A GAY UPLE RAN A RAL RTRANT PEACE. THEN NEW NEIGHBORS ARRIVED.
• GAY DICTNARY
• SPEECH ATIC FEATUR: A COMPARISON OF GAY MEN, HETEROSEXUAL MEN, AND HETEROSEXUAL WOMEN

POLARI: THE LANGUAGE GAY MEN ED TO SURVIVE

In his current rearch, Leap is lookg at Harleme, the language of the Harlem Renaissance, where he c a rich and dynamic queer prence and a manner of speakg that, while beg not exclively queer, has fluenced both gay and mastream language to this day. She-g appears almost universally and across centuri gay language, om Pe to the Philipp to South Ai (where gay slang is lled Gayle), to Israel (lled oxtch, rived om an Arabic word meang "my sister"), to Soviet-era Rsia. But Put's Rsia, where the environment remas extremely hostile for LGBT people, the webse, acrdg to a paper by rearcher Stephan Nance, lists a urse on how to speak prent-day Rsian gay, a slang lled goluboy -- om a word related to the bluish lor of a dove -- prumably to help gay Rsians intify one another.

A GAY PAPER: WHY SHOULD SOCLGUISTICS BOTHER WH SEMANTICS?

") Denis Provencher, partment head of French and Italian at the Universy of Arizona, has yet to intify a siar argot as Polari or rearch to gay-specific slang French, where disurse, typil French fashn, operat as more waltz than stri. " While vobulary might be the most fun part of lavenr lguistics for the layperson, scholars are ncerned wh aspects such as tone, flectn, and gturg, as well as the polil and cultural implitns of language -- how the prs wre about LGBT issu, for example, or how queer people munite wh each other privately and at work, or how gay language is learned.

I'd love to do some further rearch to this area of 'Lavenr Lguistics, ' and - while I unrstand that n be difficult to terme whether the lguistic featur ed nversatn are directly related to the sexuali of the speakers or not - I would be particularly terted examg how gay men may/may not speak ls 'gay' certa ntexts e. In his germal socphoic study of the topic, for example, Gd (Reference Gd1994) eliced listeners' judgments of the perceived masculy and the perceived gayns of eight male speakers, four of whom self-intified as ‘gay’ and four of whom did not.

GAYDAR—SENDG MIXED SIGNALS

Smyth and lleagu terpret this fdg as evince of a stereotypil associatn between gay men and ‘formaly’ or ‘prtige’, such that men speakg more formal ntexts are more likely to be perceived as feme/gay than when they are speakg more rmal ntexts. Smyth and lleagu, however, utn that while this pattern exists among the speakers as a group, there also exist differenc among the dividual men tted such that what listeners perceive as ‘gay’ or ‘effemate’ one man's voice do not necsarily get perceived the same way another's.

To acunt for the fdgs, Campbell-Kibler argu that the relevant listeners her study are sentially basg their judgments on stored stereotypil reprentatns of known typ of men—the mascule, unted straight man and the effemate, ted gay man rpectively.

A GAY UPLE RAN A RAL RTRANT PEACE. THEN NEW NEIGHBORS ARRIVED.

Lastly, a recent study of perceptns of sexualy Copenhagen by Pharao, Maegaard, Møller, & Kristiansen (Reference Pharao, Maegaard, Møller and Kristiansen2014) has unvered an analogo stereotype effect, though this se perceptns of gayns are seemgly blocked by perceived ethnicy.

First, parallelg the recent work by Campbell-Kibler (Reference Campbell-Kibler2011) and Pharao and lleagu (Reference Pharao, Maegaard, Møller and Kristiansen2014), I exame listeners' perceptns of different batns of xil lguistic featur, cludg both those that are stereotypilly patible wh gayns (e.

My predictn is that stereotyp will serve to block the simultaneo perceptn of normatively patible percepts, such that listeners who are prented wh stimuli signed to signal both ‘gay’ and ‘workg-class, ’ for example, will only perceive one of the social attribut.

GAY DICTNARY

In terms of a lk between genr/sexualy and social class, rearch history and soclogy has argued that both effemacy and gayns men are normatively associated wh higher social-class posns, particularly Bra (Mosse Reference Mosse1985; Keogh, Dodds, & Henrson Reference Keogh, Dodds; and Henrson1994; Connell Reference Connell1995, Reference Connell2000). While ltle soclguistic rearch has foced specifilly on the topic of sexualy and social class, there is neverthels some support (both anecdotal and experimental) for the notn that listeners perceive gay-soundg speech as simultaneoly soundg ls workg-class, and vice versa (see e.

Campbell-Kibler Reference Campbell-Kibler2011; Drager Reference Drager2011);• Sibilance (sexualy)—rearch has also shown that spectral properti of the voicels sibilant /s/, cludg elevated levels of Centre of Gravy (CoG) and a more negative spectral skew, are posively rrelated wh listener perceptns of gayns men (e. The sl were signed to elic listener judgments of var standard characteristics, such as speakers' perceived petence (telligent/not telligent, ted/not ted) and likeabily (pendable/not pendable, hardworkg/lazy, scere/dishont, iendly/not iendly) as well as their perceived genr (mascule/not mascule) and sexualy (gay/not gay) (Scherer Reference Scherer1972; Gd Reference Gd1994).

SPEECH ATIC FEATUR: A COMPARISON OF GAY MEN, HETEROSEXUAL MEN, AND HETEROSEXUAL WOMEN

The MRAS is therefore preferred the current rearch to other stments, such as the Inx of Homophobia (Ricketts & Hudson Reference Ricketts, Hudson, Yarber, Bserman and Schreer1998), that asss rponnts' affective and behavural reactns to particular social tegori (e. Prelimary factor analysis (see Table 3) allowed for the rctn of the eight sl to three pennt variabl for ttg: perceived petence (prised of the ‘ted’ and ‘telligent’ sl), likeabily (prised of the ‘pendable’, ‘lazy/hardworkg’, ‘dishont/scere’, and ‘iendly’ sl), and genr/sexualy (prised of the ‘mascule’ and ‘gay’ sl).

Fally, predictns wh rpect to the relatnship between sibilance and perceived petence are somewhat ls clear given the variety of both posive and negative rrelatns between petence and gayns that have been reported the lerature (e.