gender and language

[Laurence Horn]

At 8:17 AM -0400 10/25/01, Henry Rogers wrote:
>
>I also echo the concern that has been raised (Erez et al.) that the binary
>split of male-female typically used for gender is insufficiently nuanced to
>capture the reality of speech variation. I suspect that at least some of the
>phonetic characteristics of gay-sounding male speech are borrowed
>from straight
>female speech patterns and act to create a distance from
>straight-sounding men,
>using some sort of covert prestige.
>
Another way of putting this, based on work by Sally McConnell-Ginet
and others, is that it's not so much a question of gay(-sounding)
male speech borrowing traits from straight female speech (either
self-consciously or not), but of the two varieties sharing a default
characterization in that they lack the constraints imposed on
straight male speech, e.g. flattening of pitch variation.   On this
view, what needs to be described first of all is straight male
speech, but we're so used to taking that to be the norm that we don't
see it in need of characterization.

larry