Why do gay men talk the way they do

It is common knowledge that men have lower voices than women, statistically. Whom do we include in our sample? Where does sexual orientation fit into the picture? After three years of research, linguistics professors Henry Rogers and Ron Smyth may be on the verge of answering that question.

With a broad overview of relevant literature, it becomes evident that there are very few consistencies in the results across studies, save for the fact that differences are often but not always there and may be studied. We also know that gender is phonetically indexed in differing ways depending on the language, culture, and individual Zimman, and may overlap with other social identity categories such as class Gratton, and, of course, sexual orientation.

There is very little reason to believe that the gay voice would differ from gender in terms of being constructed as an element of sexual orientation identity, rather than an inflexible trait as suggested by Rendall et al. He had 2 homosexual brothers who were older than him, and spent a lot of his youth hanging out with them and their friends and BFs, so he just picked up that way of talking.

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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. What are we trying to predict?

They want to know how men acquire this manner. Importantly, gender inversion theory is not relegated to the domain of speech and speech perception. [5] Since the gay community consists of many. Sedivy describes the tendency for listeners to make split-second assumptions about speakers based on auditory features such as accents and dialects.

After identifying phonetic characteristics that seem to make a man’s voice sound gay, their best hunch is that some gay men may subconsciously adopt certain female speech patterns. However, they did observe significant differences in formant frequencies of certain vowels.

Gender inversion theory, which has Freudian origins, is intertwined with long-standing stereotypes of queerness, in which queer members of one sex will exhibit behaviours more similar to that of heterosexual members of the opposite sex Kachel et al.

However, for the purposes of this paper, non-linguistic aspects of the theory are largely irrelevant. An article by Rendall et al. In reply to point 2, I knew a guy in college who spoke in that stereotypical “gay” way, but was straight. This is due to physiological differences spurred by estrogen- versus testosterone-dominant puberties, in which the latter spurs a lengthening of the vocal tract Listen Lab, Although some arguments have been made as to correlations between overall body size see Rendall et al.

However, the correlation between vocal tract length and body size is relatively stable in women as compared to men, whose body sizes do not systematically correlate with the sizes of their vocal tracts; further, gender differences in voice resonance are statistically disproportionate to the average difference in vocal tract shape and length between men and women Listen Lab, Many gendered patterns of speech and vocal production are acquired in childhood — well before puberty spurs physiological differences in the vocal tract—sometimes as young as three or four years old Zimman, Coates,p.

This question is surprisingly difficult to answer and poses many problems when researching the gay voice and auditory gaydar. Why do some gay men “sound” gay?

Why Do Gay Men : " He adds that the special speech patterns were a way for gay men to identify themselves to others at a time when it was dangerous to be out of the closet

While accents are usually associated with region or socioeconomic class, the same process can be applied to the various ways queer people might speak differently than their non-queer majority counterparts. [4] In older work, speech pathologists often focused on high pitch among men, in its resemblance to women, as a defect.

Gender can be defined as the behavioural, psychological, social, and cultural traits typically associated with one biological sex group Merriam-Webster, Gender nonconformity, then, is an outward expression of gender that defies the typical norms associated with the gender one identifies with Merriam-Webster, ; White, Queer communities may be disproportionately gender nonconforming Kachel et al.

Fundamental questions must be asked to remain aware of potential biases in researching queer populations. Stereotypes that inform the listener as to the identity of the speaker can be critical in terms of actually processing auditory linguistic input, as some acoustic features of speech may be closely tied to the identity of a given speaker; these cues can vary wildly between identity categories, gender included Sedivy, By analyzing the linguistic features often associated with queer identity, we can better understand attitudes and perceptions of queerness.

Gender inversion theory does not inherently dispute this view. Although gender inversion theory fails to account for the robust psycholinguistic factors at play, the theory persists, and the idea that sexual orientation can be detected phonetically remains a compelling one across cultures.