Why do gay people sound like that

They might speak in higher pitches and a more melodious groove to their speech. An article by Rendall et al. 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.

This question is surprisingly difficult to answer and poses many problems when researching the gay voice and auditory gaydar. Gay male speech has been the focus of numerous modern stereotypes, as well as sociolinguistic studies, particularly within North American English.

Sedivy describes the tendency for listeners to make split-second assumptions about speakers based on auditory features such as accents and dialects.

Why Do Gay Men : 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

But is the gay accent even real? Scientific research has uncovered phonetically significant features produced by many gay men and demonstrated that listeners accurately guess speakers' sexual orientation at rates greater than chance.

What are we trying to predict? 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.

And if it is, why does it even exist?In an effort to increase my understanding of this world and how it. 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.

Where does sexual orientation fit into the picture? However, for the purposes of this paper, non-linguistic aspects of the theory are largely irrelevant. 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.

However, they did observe significant differences in formant frequencies of certain vowels. 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.

[1] Historically, gay male speech. Some trans men don’t change their speech patterns when they go on testosterone, resulting in a voice that kind of sounds like a “gay voice”, because it kind of works in the same premises. 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.

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.

It is common knowledge that men have lower voices than women, statistically. An exploration of the gay accent and how it became popularized (@jvn / Instagram)As most people are accustomed to believe, gay men have a very “gay” sound when they speak.

Fundamental questions must be asked to remain aware of potential biases in researching queer populations. 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.

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.

Whom do we include in our sample? Importantly, gender inversion theory is not relegated to the domain of speech and speech perception.