Phonetic Variation In Lavender Language

Gay speech is often attached to the stereotype that gay men speak with a higher, more feminine pitch. Notable linguist, Gershon Legman, went as far as to classify gay speech under the title of ‘Lavender Language’. However, by broadly classifying gay speech, there is an underlying assumption that all gay men speak alike. This not only homogenizes identity under a singular gay community, but also eliminates any notion of linguistic features according to gay subcultures. By way of an analysis of pitch properties and falsetto phonation in the speech of gay men, this essay will argue that phonetic variation is used to construct sexual identity according to situation and context. Furthermore, this essay will primarily focus on the speech of gay

75). The idea of a homogenous ‘gay community’ appeared in the 1980’s following the gay liberation movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s, where gay men and women publicly acknowledged their sexuality (Cameron and Kulick 86). Cameron and Kulick argue that by the 1980’s there was a political motivation to homogenize gay men and women into a singular community, a gay community, with its own language attached to it (92). As a result, sociolinguistic research treated gay men and women as a relatively stable and homogenous group (Podesva 175). Consequently, scholars began to define gay speech broadly, where it was classified by wider pitch range, the use of gender inversion, and the ‘lengthening of fricative sounds like /s/ and /t/’, also known as the ‘gay lisp’ (90). By contrast, Podesva argues that the generality by which early sociolinguistic research labeled gay speech eliminated any possible inquiry into how language is used according to gay subcultures such as ‘leather daddies, clones, drag queens, circuit boys, gay yuppies, gay prostitutes, and activists both mainstream and radical’ (177). Podesva explains that membership in these different subcultures tends to take priority over any notion of a singular gay community (179). It is therefore important to begin to analyze how linguistic resources may be used

However, recent sociolinguistic research has sought to refute the idea that voice quality is a fixed characteristic of gay men (Levon 29). Levon, for example, has reformulated Bell’s theory of accommodation and audience design, where he suggests that stylistic variation is not only ‘a responsive phenomenon’ but also ‘a system of production’ (32). Levon based his study on the pitch properties of gay Israeli activists, where participants were interviewed on the basis of two categories: narratives and opinions. Narratives encompassed the participant’s personal history, and opinions were anchored in a discussion of Israeli politics and gay Israeli politics. In his results, Levon found significant variation in the mean pitch of participants, where higher, more feminine, mean pitch was recorded for opinions, which appeared to represent a more ‘public out-group presentation’ (48) that correlates to popular stereotypes of Israeli gay men. By contrast, an overall lower, more masculine, mean pitch was recorded for narratives, which represented a more ‘private in-group presentation’ (48) that correlates to prevailing ideals of Israeli masculinity (48). Levon concluded that variation in mean pitch illustrates that participants shift between styles to both respond to different expectations according