Gay and Lbian Language 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.

") 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.

A GAY PAPER: WHY SHOULD SOCLGUISTICS BOTHER WH SEMANTICS?

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. 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. 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.

GAYDAR—SENDG MIXED SIGNALS

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. 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.

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

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). 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. While I am aware of no prev work that has examed the fluence of TH-ontg on perceptns of genr/sexualy, I suggt that a salient associatn between TH-ontg and workg-class speech uld lead to creased perceptns of ‘gayns’ and creased perceptns of ‘masculy’ given popular stereotyp of workg-class men as normatively mascule and heterosexual. Figure 1 is a stterplot that displays listeners evaluatns of perceived genr/sexualy on the y-axis (where higher sr dite a speaker sounds more ‘gay’ and ls ‘mascule’) and dividual MRAS sr on the x-axis (where higher MRAS dit more stereotype endorsg).

GAY DICTNARY

While much prr rearch has foced on the different social and ntextual parameters that stcture xil mutabily, the analysis prented here illtrat that listener attus play a central role, such that a listener's affective beliefs about masculy, for example, fluence whether or not a particular feature is perceived as soundg ‘gay’. In other words, for those listeners who associate pch/sibilance wh genr/sexualy, the batn of elevated mean pch and creased sibilance do not lead to an crease a speaker's perceived nonmasculy/gayns beyond what is achieved by eher of the variabl alone. The teractn between sibilance and TH-ontg on perceived likeabily uld th be potentially terpreted as an unwillgns on the part of listeners to allow voic that they perceive as nonmascule/gay to be simultaneoly perceived as more likeable.

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

If this were the se, then the teractn between sibilance and TH-ontg uld be taken to reveal an implic iologil patibily between ‘nonmasculy’/'gayns' and ‘likeabily’ that is shared by all listeners, even the absence of an overt MRAS effect. For the ‘genr/sexualy’ sle, I would argue that the procs is very much the same, wh the only difference that sibilance self n serve as a salient cue to perceived genr/sexualy for some listeners (hence the signifint boost to relevant listeners' evaluatns of the perceived nonmasculy/gayns of shifted sibilant stimuli as pared to nonshifted nonsibilant stimuli).