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. In older work,
speech pathologists often focused on high pitch among men, in its resemblance to women, as a defect. Since the
gay community consists of many smaller
subcultures, gay male speech does not uniformly fall under a single homogeneous category.
Gay "lisp" What is sometimes colloquially described as a gay "lisp" is one manner of speech associated with some homosexual males who speak English, and perhaps other languages too.
Speech scientist Benjamin Munson and his colleagues have argued that this is not a mis-articulated (and therefore, not technically a
lisp) as much as a hyper-articulated . Specifically, gay men are documented as pronouncing with higher-frequency
spectral peaks, an extremely negatively
skewed spectrum, and a longer duration than heterosexual men. However, not all gay American men speak with this hyper-articulated (perhaps fewer than half), This linguistic phenomenon is normally associated with the
California vowel shift and also reported in a study of a gay speaker of
California English itself, who strengthened these same features and also fronted the and vowels when speaking with friends more than in other speaking situations. The study suggests that a California regional sound can be employed or intensified by gay American men for stylistic effect, including to evoke a "fun" or "partier" persona.
Other characteristics Some other speech features are also stereotyped as markers of gay or bisexual males: carefully enunciated pronunciation, wide pitch range (high and rapidly changing pitch),
breathy voice, lengthened
fricative sounds,
Perception In terms of perception, the "gay sound" in North American English is popularly presumed to involve the pronunciation of
sibilants (, , ) with noticeable
assibilation, sibilation, hissing, or stridency. with experiments revealing that such articulations are perceived as "gayer-sounding" and "younger-sounding". So even if a speaker does not display all of these patterns, the stereotype of gay speech and the coordination of other non-linguistic factors, e.g. dress,
mannerisms, can help form the perception of these accents in speech. Gay speech is also widely stereotyped as resembling women's speech. In one Canadian study, listeners correctly identified gay speakers in 62% of cases. A
Stanford University experiment analyzed the acoustics of eight males (four straight and four gay), who were recorded reading passages, through the perception of listener-subjects and tasked these listeners with categorizing speakers by adjectives corresponding to common U.S. stereotypes of gay men. The listeners were generally able to correctly identify the
sexual orientation of the speakers, reflecting the stereotypes. However, there were no
statistically significant differences the listeners identified, if they existed at all, based on intonation. Another study examined the duration of certain sounds (, , and the onset of and ),
frequency of stressed
vowels,
voice-onset time of
voiceless aspirated consonants, and the release of word-final
stop consonants. claiming this to include an increased use of
superlatives, inflected
intonation, and
lisping. Later linguists have re-evaluated Lakoff's claims and concluded that these characterizations are not consistent for women, instead reflecting stereotypes that may have social meaning and importance but that do not fully capture actual gendered language use. Linguist
David Crystal correlated the use among men of an "effeminate" or "simpering" voice with a widened range of
pitch,
glissando effects between stressed syllables, greater use of fall-rise and rise-fall tones, vocal breathiness and huskiness, and occasionally more switching to the
falsetto register. Still, research has not confirmed any unique intonation or pitch qualities of gay speech. ==Other languages==