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Sometimes this is a conscious decision: I use to protect myself. This is just one example, there are plenty more.Īs a gay man, I know my speech patterns vary depending on the situation. Think of how you may speak more professionally in one setting and also have a more casual register around your friends and family. A linguistic register is a type of language used for a specific purpose. I think hits it spot on, but there is an issue with the linguistic register argument. Bottom line: interesting topic and hopefully we can all respect other speech patterns and vernaculars within communities. a British person) or other cultural speech like African-American vernacular. So basically, I feel "gay male speech" is cultural, just like dialect (think Southern drawl), accents (e.g. I explained it to my grandma this way, when she asked "why do gay men sound like that." If you were a smaller subgroup of individuals and you wanted to find other people in your community, speech is a no-fail, no-guesswork way to communicate your "membership" to and of that group. We stereotype others (positively or negatively) by dialect and all of these other factors. Think about how voice inflection, volume, even dialect and accent affects your perception of a person. We make judgements and determinations about a speaker based on those markers. We can say the same sentence but change intonation to make it "sound" angry, happy, sarcastic, etc. It's how we project our personalities and our message. We gain most information about the speaker's message by observing the use of intonation, prosody, body language, etc. When we listen to others, that's receptive communication. My perspective of "gay speech" is that it has to do with acceptance and integration into a culture/community you seek or feel a part of. Having grown up in the homo-hysterical 80s, I hate to admit that I think that those whose voices "pass" for straight are the lucky ones. This behavior trait appears on a continuum, so some men who are straight may have a feminine vocalization, while many men who are gay did not have their vocalizations "feminized" so-to-speak. Another evidence of this is that some women with very low-pitched voices may sound like gay men. I didn't learn it from anyone, it was inherent. From an early age, it identified me as gay. Generally XY babies develop masculine behaviors, and YY babies develop feminine behaviors, but sometimes the nerve pathways associated with the other sex's behaviors get developed. The extent to which we develop either is determined by the interplay of hormones in utero. The human embryo has the capacity to develop either male or female behaviors. Likewise, we humans know masculine or feminine vocalizations when we hear them.
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The male/female animal didn't learn it from its father/mother. These sex-determined vocalizations are not learned behaviors - they are inborn.
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You can identify the sex of many animals by their vocalizations. It has a biological basis, just as homosexual attraction does.