gender and language

[Henry Rogers]

I agree with Larry's notion of gay-sounding male speech being freed from the
constraints of straight male speech (at least as part of the explanation);
however, the specific example of pitch variation is problematic. In terms of
simple phonetic range, neither Gaudio nor we found any difference in gay- and
straight sounding male speech. Further, Henton and others have argued that the
widely reported greater female variation results from improper normalisation of
pitch range; she says that when done in semitones, male voices actually show
greater variation than female.

Hank Rogers

Laurence Horn wrote:

> 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

--

Henry Rogers                                rogers at chass.utoronto.ca
6072 Robarts Library                    http://chass.utoronto.ca/~rogers/
Department of Linguistics           vox:  (416-) 978-1769
University of Toronto                  fax:    (416-) 971-2688
Toronto, Ontario,