2. Conceptualizing the sociophonetics of gender
In English we have a fairly extensive set of words to refer to gender roles, such as male,female,man
There is a great deal of variation in the extent to which these words denote social categories: for example, there is clearly a gay and lesbian community in Toronto, but probably no asexual community. Social groups can develop their own linguistic features, most often involving special lexical items or patterns of interaction in discourse. But because our research is sociophonetic,we would like to raise the question of whether each of these identifiable gender groups has a different set of phonetic markers of their group identity.
One problem,though,is that while a handful of researchers have started to examine the sociophonetics of gay men’s voices, the other groups have rarely been mentioned. The two recent survey books by Blackwell on sociolinguistics (Coulmas 1997:Chambers et al.2002)treat phonetic variation in considerable depth. And although both volumes have chapters dealing with language and gender, neither looks at the effects of gay-straight differences, let alone other gender categories, on speech. Labov,in his recent book Principles of Linguistic Change:Social Factors (2001),reports in a footnote that studies of gender differences in language have generally failed to distinguish even between gay and straight speakers.
Leap and Livia and Lall have examined certain aspects of gay and lesbian language, but here, there is very little on phonetic aspects, although there is somewhat greater inclusion of other gender categories.
What does exist generally sufferers from sampling problems with hand-picked subjects, four gay and four straight:Crist 1997 with one straight and two gay speakers). These studies also address only a few research questions (mainly whether gay men’s voices have higher pitch, or whether the sibilant S is different from that of straight men). Our research has been more extensive, looking not only at a range of speech sounds, but also at different groups of listeners, different spoken discourse styles, and at whether the gay-sounding phonetic cues tend to co-occur in the same speakers.
Although these studies do point to certain phonetic differences between gay-sounding males and others, the interpretation, including our own, has been somewhat limited. The finding of special phonetic characteristics of gay-sounding voices may be descriptively interesting, but it does not address the deeper question of how such features are acquired and maintained.
For example, we have frequently asked ourselves how and why a boy or man would speak in a way that may be socially stigmatized in both straight and gay circles (although we acknowledge that a gay voice could have social prestige in limited contexts). This leads us to conclude that gay-sounding features must be acquired unconsciously,i.e. the speakers are not aware of them and they are not able to alter them easily. This in turn suggests that they are acquired at an early age.
In particular, we know that some young boys have cross-gender speech features well before they have frequent exposure to a community of gay men. In feminine-sounding speech, female clothes and makeup, referring to himself as a girl, and adopting female roles during play. Less dramatically, parents and teachers uded to regularly send little boys with what they termed “Gender-inappropriate” speech therapy.
Male female differences in children’s speech appear quite early. We will discuss specific phonetic wxamples a bit later,but it is worth noting that the early emergence of gendered speech and language indicates that gender identity is also established quite early. This early emergence of gendered speech and language indicates that gender identity is also established quite early. This early emergence thus parallels other identity-linked phonetic variation, such as regional dialects, ethnic variants, and class markers.