Men Smiling and Looking at Each Other by Ketut Subiyanto is licensed under CC BY 2.0 in pexels.

Speech is a multifaceted phenomenon: it is cognitively governed, physically produced, and it is deeply embedded in how we navigate the world as social beings. Besides its obvious function of communicating thoughts and ideas, one’s properties of speech can also signal certain assumptions regarding their identity. Without resorting to the pronounced (no pun intended) example of British English and US English, think about how you can often assume a person asking you if you want to “come with” is from the Midwest, or you can just tell that someone is from the American South.

However, the varieties in a person’s speech can also reveal identities other than geographic origin. The folk concept of “gayspeak” or the “gay voice” – a popular label for speech patterns associated with queer men – assumes there is a distinctive manner of speaking used by this community. As you may have guessed, there indeed is research on this.

Masculinity and “Sounding Gay”

Research on gayspeak, however, reveals something more nuanced than a simple yes-or-no answer about whether queer men speak differently. Sociolinguistic research shows that there is not one specific “gay way of speaking.” Rather, what listeners perceive as “gay-sounding” is often any speech that deviates from strictly defined masculine conventions.

In other words, the folk category of “gay voice” may reveal more about rigid gender norms than about sexuality itself. A 2013 study on English speakers found that the same set of listeners rated men with differing speech characteristics as equally gay-sounding. This does not only indicate there is not a single “gay way of speaking,” but also that there are considerable differences between queer men’s speech. 

Similarly, a more recent 2018 study finds that while there is an “acoustic difference” between gay and straight German speakers’ speech, in-group differences are way more pronounced: self-identifying masculine gay men had more speech characteristics in common with self-identifying masculine straight men than other gay men – again, suggesting that this is primarily a question of masculinity and not sexuality. These findings are strengthened by a 2021 study finding most heterosexuals believed one’s characteristics of speech to be a stronger cue of sexual orientation for men than for women. 

Signaling Sexuality Through Speech

Moreover, “gayspeak” itself can also be a strategic aspect of practicing (or concealing) queer identities too. A 2020 study demonstrates that gay male speakers actively modulate their voice according to their social context. The study found that Italian and British gay men make their voice sound more “gay” (i.e., non-heteronormatively conformative) both when speaking to an individual with whom they have a comfortable relationship, if they came out a long time ago, and when they want to signal their gay identity to listeners as a social cue.

In other words, listeners aren’t hearing “gayness” when they associate certain forms of speech with queer identities – they’re hearing violations of masculine speech conventions, and associating them with queerness. 

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Engin Yolcu is a Sociology PhD student at the University of Minnesota. He also holds an MA in Sociology and a BA in Linguistics from Boğaziçi University in Istanbul.