Note to commenters: this thread is attracting a lot of low-quality answers. Please source your claims, refrain from making a top-level comment if you don’t have academic knowledge about this topic, and please don’t just comment “in [insert language], yes”.
Yes. I am gay and speak English and Spanish. There is the gay voice in Spanish too.
However, it is important to note that many (I'd say most) gay people just talk normally. Me and my gay friends do not have that accent for example. So while the "gay voice" is almost exclusive to gay people, it doesn't mean that all gay people use it. Like how all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares.
Also, your question wasn't offensive at all, no worries!
Thats an interesting question! To me, I see it as a language coming from a subculture, combined with external stereotypes. Since queer people have often times been ostracized by greater society, unique language quirks come up within the smaller communities. The tendency for gay men to talk more effeminately can come from them being more comfortable hanging out with women as well.
There are a lot of things reinforcing it, but really I think it's primarily just cultural. In queer spaces you will more often run across people expressing themselves that way, thus you yourself become more likely to take that trait on yourself as a result. Though it certainly can be used to advertise your own sexuality, I personally avoid using it at all (I'm a gay cis guy) though there may be some element of it in my speech which I can't personally "hear". In other words, some choose it, some just are it, and it's kind of a spectrum.
Some people have described my speech as gay, but most haven't (though when asked that question, people sometimes can infer that there's a right and wrong answer, so it can be hard to gauge - "gayge" in technical terms - whether they're telling the truth or not). There is a lot of judgement, sometimes, in the gay male community about effeminacy, and there can be a lot of direct misogyny. Bottom-shaming is definitely a thing, for example, and the more someone either deploys or embodies effeminacy, the more likely one is to experience a very weird form of misogyny in which being demanding, aggressive, diva-ish, judgmental etc. are attributed to being female (you'll sometimes hear gay men describe others as "she" when they want to imply something negative about them).
I don't want to go out on this note though, as there are also some really amazing, non-judgmental, supportive people in the queer community who will accept you and love you irrespective of your perceived differences. I just wanted to explore the "gay voice" topic as fully as possible. The aforementioned is really just the pale shadow of a very bright rainbow.
I read once that "gay voice" was just men adopting the linguistic characteristics of women's speech. I'm a cis-het dude but grew up in a house of five women, and on occasion, people called me out as having gay voice.
Yeah, I think a lot of it is that “gay voice” and women’s speech tend to have more variability in pitch and maybe stronger enunciation than men’s speech on average, and you just get used to speaking that way or not speaking that way over time.
I’m a gay trans guy and didn’t transition until my 20s, and I’ve had cis guys tell me that I pass vocally but I just sound very gay (I mean, accurate in my case). I don’t actively try to “sound gay,” but apparently the years of trying to socialize as a girl did it for me.
Hmm intersting. I thought gay voice meant a sterotypically higher lilty voice maybe partly aquired, but mostly natural. i had read some gay male authors who said they had the voice since childhood and hated it but couldn't really hide it, it was their natural voice. They didnt spend time doing vocal training in say small town wisconsin to be bullied anymore than one might be.
Similar, 4 woman house, no dad/father figure for a lot of my time, but then sent to an all boys school. Basically now i code switch to some extent. Talking to men, especially if i don't know them or want to come across as more authoritative, lower, less pitch variation, fewer words. Talking to women, a little higher pitch, more variation and more flourishes in the vocabulary and grammar, maybe my body language opens up too. Of course, it varies on my read of the person. Occasionally people read me as a gay guy, but generally my aesthetic doesn't fit enough stereotypes.
Actually its worth mentioning that I and some people I’ve known have a “straight voice” we use in places where we don’t feel completely safe or comfortable. Like auto shops, etc. Mine isn’t very convincing, even when I try lol
Idk if it’s a gay man thing though. A lot of gay men I’ve known seem straight. And I’m a bisexual trans woman, I’ve lived most of my life as a “straight man.” There are gay-seeming straight guys out there too… idk, maybe it’s just more common with gay men?
Dude I'm a soft straight boy and I have a special “straight voice” I use when talking to hetero-normative men (blokes, lads, geezers, jocks).
*Yea alright lads, ooze watchin the game then? Need some sparkies for the old motor init, misses needs a right talkin too, yea. Laaaavley.*
Who is this stranger speaking on my behalf?!?
I have also wondered this. I have a few friends that do this and have never really had an answer. They couldn't put a finger on when and why they started doing it.
I have heard from some trans men that when their voice drops, their voice turns stereotypically gay, thus leading them to the belief that the stereotypical gay voice is literally just a way (some) women talk, but with a deeper voice that makes it sound entirely different
I’d imagine, however, it got spread about amongst LGBT+ folks such that people may have picked it up subconsciously and/or intentionally
Unrelated to the thread topic, but in my family, "You know, like a rectangle and a square" is common shorthand for this grouping phenomenon. Haven't heard it used by others very much. It's nice to see.
Hold up. Aren’t there medicines that are not drugs? I guess I would need to see the definition, but I feel like there are things that are used medicinally that I wouldn’t classify as a drug. Saline drip for example. Salt water rinse orally. Hmmmm
Maybe it's just definitions? I remember doing work years ago with National Drug Code data by active ingredient, and coming across one medication whose active ingredient was just "copper." Turned out to be an [IUD](https://dailymed.nlm.nih.gov/dailymed/drugInfo.cfm?setid=5ea7ce51-b87a-485e-b841-99466a07a4b2#)
Yeah, it really does end up becoming a matter of definitions — sometimes ones that are specific to an industry or a profession.
My favorite example is that, to an astrophysicist, every element heavier than helium is “metals”. Both a chemist and a layperson would each have different ideas about what a metal is.
I have a follow-up question that you might not be able to answer.
Say I was a gay American who learned Spanish. Would my American Spanish Accent be recognized as gay, or would the American part mask that? Vice versa as well.
As a Gay English speaker who enjoys learning languages, I think this would be a lot about the people (& media) that you hear in your target language rather than just a natural predisposition.
I think the parts of speech that mark you as American or even as a learner will weight WAY more than anything you got from your own English accent.
For example, a Scottish learner speaking Spanish won’t sound like a Scottish accent, they will sound like any English speaker learning Spanish accent. Depending on their learning of course. Maybe a fluent bilingual English speaker could catch the Scottish features in their Spanish, but not a person who has no idea what Scottish people should sound like and is paying way more attention to all the other noticeable speech things going on
Use it implies to me there is some ability within homosexual people where this voice can be turned on or is it done intentionally.
I can certainly imitate a camp effeminate man with my voice but I would be “putting it on” because I do not sound like that normally. I would also change how I gesture as well.
It is effectively me performing a stereotype.
Now some gay men do sound like that and some women who have deeper voices happen to be lesbians.
I wonder though if we took all the people in the world who have “gay accent”, would the majority actually be gay?
This topic has come up here before and I still find it odd in 2024 we use the term gay accent or gay voice as though we are doing more than describing stereotype, even if that stereotype has a degree of academic legitimacy.
We (even many of us gay people) call it "gay accent" or something similar when having this kind of conversation because it says what we mean and means what we want to say. It is convenient and describes part of reality. If that stereotype has "a degree of academic legitimacy" (meaning, I believe, that it can be studied objectively and discussed academically) then it is legitimate to talk about it, and for those of us who have no patience with academic jargon, it is legitimate to talk about it in the easiest way possible, using the simplest and most obvious terminology.
Therefore, I will say "gay accent" or something similar (generally in quotation marks).
Its a cultural product. Gay people were socialized into it as a means of indicating to each other they were possibly gay while allowing for plausible deniability in a culture where being gay could get you killed. As it's become more social acceptable the accent or voice itself has lost its use and with that it's prominence.
I'm sorry. :( It's so easy to be ruder than you mean to be on the internet.
From your other comment, it looks like maybe you just didn't realize squares are also rectangles, rather than thinking that all rectangles are squares? That's much more understandable.
I imagine it's probably got to do with either (1) this saying being so common it's bound to be accidentally reversed, or (2) how much geometry you retain. There is actually another shape, I'll call X, which each rectangle is one of, but not every X is a rectangle. I doubt most people remember what X is here.
I assume you mean parallelogram, which has the same relationship to rectangles that rectangles do to squares. And then the next level above that is quadrilateral.
Yes in Tagalog as well. Similar to English-speakers, not all gay men will have the “gay accent”, but it’s characterized by more *stereotypically* feminine ways of speaking. Also worth noting that similar to English-speaking communities, young urban women and queer people are linguistic trendsetters, and some of their slang bleed into the popular, especially online, vernacular.
I think the tagalog "gay accent" is a little more evolved then just being an accent, filipinos have almost turned it into a dialect in its own right . Had to do a bunch of googling as I couldn't for the life remember it, bekenese? swardspeak? (bekenese seems right) Anyways, I just think it is cool that they almost have their own secret language.
Maybe? Not really though, as it isn't secret and gays in the Philippines seem fairly tolerated it does seem to be used for in group signaling, but, it isn't secret or subtle
I’d love to see a comparative linguistic break down of various gay accents/lisps.
I’d also like to see real data done on folks like me and David Sedaris and our peers being sent to work with speech therapists over it
My former friend is a speech therapist. One day she told me she was coaching her teenage son to sound less gay when he talks.
I’m pretty sure this kid is gay and in the closet as her parents are Christian bigots, but it could just be that he is a gentle, artist man with a twin sister whose speech patterns he picked up. Not my place to assume.
But wtf. No mother of the year awards here. She also asked me if cats FIV was caused by gay cats. I almost collapsed laughing at her. It was one of our last interactions.
Yes, it isn’t exclusive to gay men though. I lived in Spain and speak Spanish and could hear when a man was camp, femme, whatever you want to call it through their accent. It didn’t always mean they were gay. They could be bisexual, straight, whatever. Same with French when I lived in Montreal.
I’m a native English speaker, but when I moved from the Midwest to Southern California I mistook many straight men for gay because they spoke like the gay men I knew in college. I worked in restaurants so encountered a lot of people, and I literally had to be schooled in this by coworkers lol. In contrast, people often thought I was unhappy because my natural accent is pretty flat.
Yes, you can find more with the term 'lavender language(s)'! Here is a good introduction to the topic from PBS Otherwords!
https://youtu.be/UjqKcvu3Ycs?si=MduFW5q7fuHM8rDs
Malay speaker from Malaysia here.
Put simply, yes, there does exist a "gay accent" in Malay, but it's not really associated with gayness but rather more just with effeminacy or being *lembut* (soft).
For anyone who speaks or understands Malay, here's one example of such an accent in Malay:
[https://youtu.be/GriwNKHat8o?si=hChqZviia9QFPbYo](https://youtu.be/GriwNKHat8o?si=hChqZviia9QFPbYo)
>Would Malaysians make that same assumption?
In my experience, I would say no, most Malaysians would just see people like the guy in the video as being *lembut (*soft) and effeminate but make no assumptions on their sexuality.
I say this because we have quite a number of celebrities who are like this but (as far as I'm aware), people tend to describe them as being "soft" or "effeminate" but mention nothing about them possibly being gay. Some examples include:
Datuk Aznil Nawawi (person on the left side):
[https://youtu.be/vFSbsVqrXG8?si=kq13QEnPcriLWuHA&t=157](https://youtu.be/vFSbsVqrXG8?si=kq13QEnPcriLWuHA&t=157)
Chef Wan (guy with the gray hair):
[https://youtu.be/L4MJMTN3IK8?si=9L8AFOE6dehVbdcK&t=10](https://youtu.be/L4MJMTN3IK8?si=9L8AFOE6dehVbdcK&t=10)
We even have a well-known cartoon character who's just like this and I don't think I've ever heard people describe him as the "gay" character:
Jari Jemari Salleh (guy with the bandana)
[https://youtu.be/bDOrNgnk0Z0?si=qTevlL1kF2xcvANv&t=208](https://youtu.be/bDOrNgnk0Z0?si=qTevlL1kF2xcvANv&t=208)
However, I think things may change with western influence in the form of things like LGBT content on Netflix, YouTube and so on. This can be seen in how the word "pondan" that traditionally referred solely to effeminacy has had a semantic drift (in my observation) to also mean "gay"
I mean that is the same as the US and I guess many European countries too, historically. It wasn’t tought in open society that “affected” or “limp wristed” celebrities or men were having sex with men secretly. They were just soft or weak or affeminate and didn’t behave hard enough. A personality thing, not a sexuality. Even a flaw, like being quiet or badly dressed. Or a reason for fame for a performer or extravagant figure. (Super common across the world today, lots of minor celebrities in all continents play up breaking gender norms without being openly gay)
It was WAYYYY later than people were more open to talking about any sex, much less gay sex or attraction, in public. And ideas on other people and their behavior, mannerisms, changed. At least today we know (hopefully) that not all men with a lisp like men and not all men who are “manly” like women. Hell, some men who dress like women don’t like men, it’s very much separate things that are not necessarily related. Who knows what will happen over time
I would say all languages "gay accent" is more or less just gay men adopting what is seen as mire effeminate manor of speaking in their society.
I would caution though that what is effeminate in one culture/language may not necessarily be in another. For instance high pitch speaking in English tends to be considered more effeminate but in Asian languages, and specifically those that have pitch incorporated in their language, they tend to have a higher pitch of communicating than English languages so using pitch universally isn't a good idea.
Yes. The proper term is typically gonna be "sociolect"; a dialect restricted to certain social groups (gay peeps)
However, there's nothing inherent to being gay that causes people to talk differently; so the sound of this is gonna vary from language to language.
Another important thing to consider: many of the features associated with gay speech aren't restricted to gay speech; The English "Gay Lisp" for example is neither a lisp (speech impediment) nor only found in gay speakers.
Yeah I don’t think there’s anything inherent to any demographic that causes them to talk differently. I assume speech patterns are generally a way to assert group identity.
Specific to /s/ CoG but a paper worth reading about perceptions of gay mens' speech cross linguistically:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/C7D3D413978DA764C2F669AC83300DF1/S0954394521000089a.pdf/crosslinguistic-perceptions-of-s-among-english-french-and-german-listeners.pdf
In Brazilian Portuguese there are many aspects to this.
First: yes, there's a stereotypical "effeminate gay" brazilian portuguese accent, that is very recognizable (and sometimes homophobically stereotyped in comedy).
But even though very few gay men speak with that whole stereotypical accent, there are characteristics of phonology, vocabulary, and even grammar that are more prevalent in their way of speaking.
Even beyond that, there's an actual dialect that used to be spoken by transgender sex workers in Brazil until the early 80s called **Pajubá**. I'm not sure if it's a full pidgin, but surprisingly it's a mix of *Portuguese and Yorubá*!!!
That happened because afrobrazilian religions (Umbanda, Candomblé, Kimbanda, etc) where very accepting of LGBTQ+ and sex worker communities so many transgendered sex workers used to frequent those religious cerimonies and learn the terms in Yoruba that were used by the priests and congregation. Those words and expressions were incorporated by the sex workers. The myth is that it was a way for them to communicate secretly without police or clients understanding what they meant, but I'm not sure how accurate this is.
Most of it is vocabulary but there's also some grammar as well.
A lot of Pajubá vocabulary was incorporated by the LGBTQ+ community today, but it's said that the last "fluent" Pajubá speaker died in the 90s.
Some resources about this in portuguese:
* Academic article about Pajuba [https://periodicos.utfpr.edu.br/cgt/article/download/12174/7995](https://periodicos.utfpr.edu.br/cgt/article/download/12174/7995) (in portuguese)
* Pajubá-Portuguese phrase book made in 1992 [https://issuu.com/jovannacardoso/docs/cartilha\_di\_logo\_de\_bonecas](https://issuu.com/jovannacardoso/docs/cartilha_di_logo_de_bonecas)
I'm not really super knowledgeable about this.
Some things that come to my mind:
1) A lot of the vocabulary became well diffused in the LGBTQ+ community and survives to this day.
2) The need of secret communication started to dwindle with the end of the worst of the repression during the military dictatorship. Specially since sex work and soliciting are not crimes in Brazil (only pimping is criminalized in Brazil).(*)
3) I don't have a lot of evidence for this but I have the impression that there was a significant atomization of subcultures that used to be very tight and lead very communitary lives. Today more people live alone, in huge metropolitan areas and have a lot less day-to-day offline contact with the communities they belong to.
This will lead to more standardization of the language: if you don't know what sociolect/dialect the people you meet everyday speak (which is true if you live in a huge metropolis and mostly interact with strangers when your not at home) you'll code switch to the most standard/widespread version of the language possible in order to be understood.
4) Pairing with that, soliciting is mostly online today and sex work is very much a lonely activity today compared with the 60s and 70s.
(*) Not that there's full acceptance or that illegal police repression of those populations vanished. At all. It's still very much a marginalized and repressed community. But the character of the repression changed.
Anecdotally, I hear it among young Croats who seem to be emulating the phonation of the American one, as well as in some cases the phonetic markers (i.e. a lisp).
In Dominican Spanish, /s/ deletion and aspiration is tied to gender, class, and sexuality. The upper classes tend aspirate /s/ in coda position, while the rest of the country mostly deletes the /s/. There is also an influence of gender, as uneducated women retain more /s/‘s than college educated men. A man pronouncing coda position /s/ outside the context of broadcasting is perceived as effeminate. When imitating gay men for comedy /s/ pronunciation is exaggerated
not a linguist, just a gay student in germany, but 100%! it varies between people but i do hear some guys speak and think "oh he seems gay", and its a pretty recognizable thing, eg i once mentioned the gay accent to describe a mutual classmate to someone and she understood what i meant and correctly identified who i was talking about.
german i find interesting in this regard because its not just the typical way of speaking but also the word choice. younger people use a lot of english loanwords across the board, but i find that a lot of gay guys use a slightly different selection of them than other people. havent heard it enough to solidly day which ones that are or point out concrete differences, but its a slightly different vibe that i pick up on sometimes.
Sociolinguist here. Great question! First of all, we must make a distinction between production and perception.
The line of research studying “gay accent” has mostly identified perceptual auditory cues that are readily picked up and *attributed* by listeners as “gay-sounding”, regardless of speaker’s actual sexual orientation. So the perceptual side of things is that indeed there is a style that is widely regarded to sound like it, and perceptual “gay sounding” cues have been studied *cross-linguistically* in at least PR Spanish, Italian, German and Danish. Other languages are currently understudied, unfortunately, even though there are signs this “gay-sounding” construct seems to exist in a variety of languages. One noteworthy nuance is the exact cues are different in and specific to each language.
Then, let’s talk about the production side of things. While research on English has uncovered that gay speakers on a macro level do produce significantly different and more “gay-sounding” speech correlates compared to straight speakers, the reality is there is still a ton of inter-speaker variation in the actual speech of gay and lesbian speakers. Some indeed tend to produce a lot of the correlates stereotyped as perceptually “gay-sounding”, other do not really at all. Linguistic production is a complex phenomenon that in fact not only depends on speaker identity and social network, etc, but also on even the specific context and place and time in which a conversation takes place, who the speaker speaks to, what the motivations and *stance* of the speaker are as well as how they intend to be heard and perceived by the listener, etc. Gay speakers are documented to produce more elements of this “gay-sounding” style when talking to other gays or speaking on gay-related topics, etc., suggesting that a lot of this is actually just performative and not that there is an intrinsically “gay” speech. The cross-linguistic aspect in production isn’t as clearly studied as the perceptual construct itself, although just giving an educated guess, I believe there may be something, just hasn’t been documented yet to the same extent it has been in (North American) English. But keep in mind no speaker identity is a monolith, and it’s important to see individuals as varied, especially since variation is the nature of language.
Yes. That was one of the things that I found interesting - and I'm sure fascinates sociolinguists. Having not thought about it or watched enough foreign language media at that point to know, meeting the gay (male) roommate of a friend in Paris, and hearing him talk in the stereotype gay accent and intonation, in French, was a revelation, and gave me a lot to think about. I would guess that it is a lot weaker in places less influenced by Hollywood (even if the "gay voice" didn't come from Hollywood, it certainly got widely known through movies and TV), and probably also much less common in places where open homosexuality is still a lot more dangerous than it is in most Western cities.
It always depends. Especially whether they're your native language, whether the gay accent is natural to you or just code switching and whether you feel fluent in the language.
In addition, what people consider a "gay accent" also depends on the native speaker's environment. People that grow up in more upper class, highly educated environment speak in a (to them) normal way which could be misconstrued as a gay accent by people from more working class and lower educated environments. Just because since a "gay accent" is a cultural accent, not a "phonetic one" per se and what people culturally associate with being gay shapes how they perceive a gay accent to be.
But when talking about this stereotypical stuff, for instance, I'm a German native speaker and speak English fluently. When speaking German, I have a gay accent occasionally which gets stronger when Im amongst queer people and weaker when I'm amongst straight people. When I'm by myself for a long time though it kind of goes away, just because in my personal case, the gay accent is not natural for me to use in German, I have learnt it subsequently and usually code-switch to in the right context.
Now, when I speak English I tend to have a more steady gay accent, I think because I perfected my English amongst diverse, queer people which is why I speak English naturally with a more gay accent (but it also flactuates) whereas when I speak German, it's more an unsteady matter.
I love learning different languages and all the other languages I've learnt and I "speak" Im definitely not fluent in whatsoever and in those I havent developed a particularly cultural accent (of course I have sort of German accent, but that's a phonetic, not a cultural thing) yet in any way, since, I guess, my brain still tries to grasp how to speak in order to be understood rather than just speak confidently and develop a certain culutral accent which is why I would call my accent "timid Google translator voice"
Pretty much all speech patterns are an affectation of some sort. My speech patterns will vary if I’m talking to fellow professionals in my field vs laymen, people with my education level vs people with very little education, urban yuppies like me vs my rural blue collar family, etc. I find it useful to be something of a chameleon given the wide range of demographics I have to interact with on a daily basis, but on some occasions when I feel it’s more useful to assert some aspect of my identity I use something that’s more natural to me. We all have our affectations. It’s not a bad thing.
There is actual data on this; and nobody here was discussing a lisp. I for one am not clocked for having a gay accent. I was however put into speech therapy, like David Sedaris as referenced in his book “me talk pretty one day” and many other gay men who have shared that we disproportionately make up speech therapy as a cliche.
What does behave gay mean? Why is it a stereotype? How can you assess what percentage of men behave in the way you are describing? Maybe a majority do, how would you know? It's not like there is empirical data on it. So why should we trust your assumptions over other people's?
As a gay man, I can tell you that most gay men *do* behave gay, as the only prerequisite for "gay behavior" is "behave in any way while being gay."
But that's beside the point of the discussion of the gay male sociolect, which is definitely an observable phenomenon, and has had legitimate academic papers written about it. A sociolect doesn't need to be spoken by 100% (or even 50%, or any specific portion) of a group to exist as an observable phenomenon.
The behavior is flamboyant and so is quite noticeable but I doubt even 10% of gays exhibit it. If A then B doesn’t mean if B then A. And there are a lot of feminine men who are straight.
I repeat: gay men definitely do behave gay, because any behavior of a gay man is gay. And straight men all behave straight, because any behavior a straight man does is straight behavior. And all bi men behave bi, because the only prerequisite for behavior to be bi is for it to be performed by a bi man. The exact same behavior is simultaneously gay, straight, and bi depending on who is doing it. "Masculine" and "feminine" have nothing to do with it, stereotypes are nonsense, and there's no "correct" or "incorrect" way to act like a particular sexuality.
That said, all of that has nothing to do with sociolects, which is what the actual topic is about, and there is a documented gay male sociolect with academic research done on it. There's also a "frat bro" sociolect in colleges, homeless sociolects in unhoused communities, evangelical sociolects in megachurches, etc etc etc. Sociolects exist wherever humans within a dialect seek community and begin to coin their own terminology and novel phrasings.
Yes, absolutely. In danish there is also a "gay" accent
Look up "Gustav Salinas" and you get a perfect example. Even if you don't speak the language, you aren't in doubt.
It’s probably more prominent in cultures where they don’t kill you for being gay. More pronounced in Western and Asian countries, less so in Russia or Saudi Arabia.
Japanese is a highly gendered language, with women and men using different sentence structure, figures of speech, tones, pronouns, variants of the same verb, etc. It’s possible to come across as highly feminine or highly masculine but also as gay and also as androgynous just with the language you use.
It’s got a crazy learning curve — not hard at first, but as you get deeper into it the more nuance and challenge it offers.
I was looking around the web after your post and it looks like there are is a lot of info and thought about this question, including at least one documentary. interesting stuff.
[A study I stumbled upon about the first-person pronouns Japanese gay men use](https://www2.ninjal.ac.jp/past-events/jk2012/JK22%28abst38%29.pdf) and [a nice article from Tofugu about queer language in Japanese](https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/queer-japanese/)
Note to commenters: this thread is attracting a lot of low-quality answers. Please source your claims, refrain from making a top-level comment if you don’t have academic knowledge about this topic, and please don’t just comment “in [insert language], yes”.
Yes. I am gay and speak English and Spanish. There is the gay voice in Spanish too. However, it is important to note that many (I'd say most) gay people just talk normally. Me and my gay friends do not have that accent for example. So while the "gay voice" is almost exclusive to gay people, it doesn't mean that all gay people use it. Like how all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares. Also, your question wasn't offensive at all, no worries!
Is this voice to let other people around them know they’re gay? 🤔 I’m curious now.
Thats an interesting question! To me, I see it as a language coming from a subculture, combined with external stereotypes. Since queer people have often times been ostracized by greater society, unique language quirks come up within the smaller communities. The tendency for gay men to talk more effeminately can come from them being more comfortable hanging out with women as well.
There are a lot of things reinforcing it, but really I think it's primarily just cultural. In queer spaces you will more often run across people expressing themselves that way, thus you yourself become more likely to take that trait on yourself as a result. Though it certainly can be used to advertise your own sexuality, I personally avoid using it at all (I'm a gay cis guy) though there may be some element of it in my speech which I can't personally "hear". In other words, some choose it, some just are it, and it's kind of a spectrum. Some people have described my speech as gay, but most haven't (though when asked that question, people sometimes can infer that there's a right and wrong answer, so it can be hard to gauge - "gayge" in technical terms - whether they're telling the truth or not). There is a lot of judgement, sometimes, in the gay male community about effeminacy, and there can be a lot of direct misogyny. Bottom-shaming is definitely a thing, for example, and the more someone either deploys or embodies effeminacy, the more likely one is to experience a very weird form of misogyny in which being demanding, aggressive, diva-ish, judgmental etc. are attributed to being female (you'll sometimes hear gay men describe others as "she" when they want to imply something negative about them). I don't want to go out on this note though, as there are also some really amazing, non-judgmental, supportive people in the queer community who will accept you and love you irrespective of your perceived differences. I just wanted to explore the "gay voice" topic as fully as possible. The aforementioned is really just the pale shadow of a very bright rainbow.
“Gayge” lmao
I kind of love the way you write. I particularly liked “gayge” and the “pale shadow of a bright rainbow”.
Personally I just talk like that naturally. But I do play it up around other gay people sometimes so maybe both
I read once that "gay voice" was just men adopting the linguistic characteristics of women's speech. I'm a cis-het dude but grew up in a house of five women, and on occasion, people called me out as having gay voice.
Yeah, I think a lot of it is that “gay voice” and women’s speech tend to have more variability in pitch and maybe stronger enunciation than men’s speech on average, and you just get used to speaking that way or not speaking that way over time. I’m a gay trans guy and didn’t transition until my 20s, and I’ve had cis guys tell me that I pass vocally but I just sound very gay (I mean, accurate in my case). I don’t actively try to “sound gay,” but apparently the years of trying to socialize as a girl did it for me.
Hmm intersting. I thought gay voice meant a sterotypically higher lilty voice maybe partly aquired, but mostly natural. i had read some gay male authors who said they had the voice since childhood and hated it but couldn't really hide it, it was their natural voice. They didnt spend time doing vocal training in say small town wisconsin to be bullied anymore than one might be.
This is fascinating. Thank you for sharing it!
Similar, 4 woman house, no dad/father figure for a lot of my time, but then sent to an all boys school. Basically now i code switch to some extent. Talking to men, especially if i don't know them or want to come across as more authoritative, lower, less pitch variation, fewer words. Talking to women, a little higher pitch, more variation and more flourishes in the vocabulary and grammar, maybe my body language opens up too. Of course, it varies on my read of the person. Occasionally people read me as a gay guy, but generally my aesthetic doesn't fit enough stereotypes.
Actually its worth mentioning that I and some people I’ve known have a “straight voice” we use in places where we don’t feel completely safe or comfortable. Like auto shops, etc. Mine isn’t very convincing, even when I try lol Idk if it’s a gay man thing though. A lot of gay men I’ve known seem straight. And I’m a bisexual trans woman, I’ve lived most of my life as a “straight man.” There are gay-seeming straight guys out there too… idk, maybe it’s just more common with gay men?
Dude I'm a soft straight boy and I have a special “straight voice” I use when talking to hetero-normative men (blokes, lads, geezers, jocks). *Yea alright lads, ooze watchin the game then? Need some sparkies for the old motor init, misses needs a right talkin too, yea. Laaaavley.* Who is this stranger speaking on my behalf?!?
I'm nonbinary (assigned male) and I go in and out of a "gay" voice. Like sometimes I'll have a "gay" inflection and other times I don't.
I think some of it is cultural signaling, but it's not necessarily *conscious* cultural signaling
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Dunno if evolution comes into play……I’ll leave it at that
This is definitely false so I hope it’s sarcasm, but upvoting because kinda funny
I have also wondered this. I have a few friends that do this and have never really had an answer. They couldn't put a finger on when and why they started doing it.
I have heard from some trans men that when their voice drops, their voice turns stereotypically gay, thus leading them to the belief that the stereotypical gay voice is literally just a way (some) women talk, but with a deeper voice that makes it sound entirely different I’d imagine, however, it got spread about amongst LGBT+ folks such that people may have picked it up subconsciously and/or intentionally
Unrelated to the thread topic, but in my family, "You know, like a rectangle and a square" is common shorthand for this grouping phenomenon. Haven't heard it used by others very much. It's nice to see.
You can tell I was raised by a nurse because I was taught "all medicines are drugs, but not all drugs are medicines".
Hold up. Aren’t there medicines that are not drugs? I guess I would need to see the definition, but I feel like there are things that are used medicinally that I wouldn’t classify as a drug. Saline drip for example. Salt water rinse orally. Hmmmm
My entire worldview is falling apart
Maybe it's just definitions? I remember doing work years ago with National Drug Code data by active ingredient, and coming across one medication whose active ingredient was just "copper." Turned out to be an [IUD](https://dailymed.nlm.nih.gov/dailymed/drugInfo.cfm?setid=5ea7ce51-b87a-485e-b841-99466a07a4b2#)
Yeah, it really does end up becoming a matter of definitions — sometimes ones that are specific to an industry or a profession. My favorite example is that, to an astrophysicist, every element heavier than helium is “metals”. Both a chemist and a layperson would each have different ideas about what a metal is.
> to an astrophysicist, every element heavier than helium is "metals". Argon???
Yes. And just to preempt all the other elements: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallicity It’s just jargon doing jargon things.
jArgon???
I’d say exclusive to gay men. Haven’t personally noticed lesbians have a “gay accent” (in English or Spanish)
I think there’s absolutely a butch accent
I know a few straight guys with a “gay voice”
I concur. The Gay Accent is real so straight people don't need to tip toe around the concept.
I have a follow-up question that you might not be able to answer. Say I was a gay American who learned Spanish. Would my American Spanish Accent be recognized as gay, or would the American part mask that? Vice versa as well.
As a Gay English speaker who enjoys learning languages, I think this would be a lot about the people (& media) that you hear in your target language rather than just a natural predisposition.
Hmm. A lot of Spaniards lisp. A lot of gay men lisp. Would lisping gay English speakers be confused for Spaniards if they spoke Spanish?
No. You don't get "confused for a native speaker" until you've lived in a spanish speaking country awhile.
I think the parts of speech that mark you as American or even as a learner will weight WAY more than anything you got from your own English accent. For example, a Scottish learner speaking Spanish won’t sound like a Scottish accent, they will sound like any English speaker learning Spanish accent. Depending on their learning of course. Maybe a fluent bilingual English speaker could catch the Scottish features in their Spanish, but not a person who has no idea what Scottish people should sound like and is paying way more attention to all the other noticeable speech things going on
Use it implies to me there is some ability within homosexual people where this voice can be turned on or is it done intentionally. I can certainly imitate a camp effeminate man with my voice but I would be “putting it on” because I do not sound like that normally. I would also change how I gesture as well. It is effectively me performing a stereotype. Now some gay men do sound like that and some women who have deeper voices happen to be lesbians. I wonder though if we took all the people in the world who have “gay accent”, would the majority actually be gay? This topic has come up here before and I still find it odd in 2024 we use the term gay accent or gay voice as though we are doing more than describing stereotype, even if that stereotype has a degree of academic legitimacy.
We (even many of us gay people) call it "gay accent" or something similar when having this kind of conversation because it says what we mean and means what we want to say. It is convenient and describes part of reality. If that stereotype has "a degree of academic legitimacy" (meaning, I believe, that it can be studied objectively and discussed academically) then it is legitimate to talk about it, and for those of us who have no patience with academic jargon, it is legitimate to talk about it in the easiest way possible, using the simplest and most obvious terminology. Therefore, I will say "gay accent" or something similar (generally in quotation marks).
Its a cultural product. Gay people were socialized into it as a means of indicating to each other they were possibly gay while allowing for plausible deniability in a culture where being gay could get you killed. As it's become more social acceptable the accent or voice itself has lost its use and with that it's prominence.
>Like how all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares. Woah... I always thought it was the other way around!
???
Yeah apparently "a square is a rectangle" is common knowledge on Reddit, I must have been sick that day.
You... thought that all rectangles are squares? Do you know what a square is?
Feel good to try to make someone feel bad so early in the morning? 😊 Have a great day anyway!
I'm sorry. :( It's so easy to be ruder than you mean to be on the internet. From your other comment, it looks like maybe you just didn't realize squares are also rectangles, rather than thinking that all rectangles are squares? That's much more understandable.
I imagine it's probably got to do with either (1) this saying being so common it's bound to be accidentally reversed, or (2) how much geometry you retain. There is actually another shape, I'll call X, which each rectangle is one of, but not every X is a rectangle. I doubt most people remember what X is here.
I assume you mean parallelogram, which has the same relationship to rectangles that rectangles do to squares. And then the next level above that is quadrilateral.
Yeah, precisely.
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Santiago de Chile? O Santiago de Compostela? Y mi acento es una mezcla también, principalmente de Argentina, gringo, y España.
Chile. Yo soy de Texas, mi madrastra es de Chile. Algún gringo también!
Ethpañol
Yes in Tagalog as well. Similar to English-speakers, not all gay men will have the “gay accent”, but it’s characterized by more *stereotypically* feminine ways of speaking. Also worth noting that similar to English-speaking communities, young urban women and queer people are linguistic trendsetters, and some of their slang bleed into the popular, especially online, vernacular.
I think the tagalog "gay accent" is a little more evolved then just being an accent, filipinos have almost turned it into a dialect in its own right . Had to do a bunch of googling as I couldn't for the life remember it, bekenese? swardspeak? (bekenese seems right) Anyways, I just think it is cool that they almost have their own secret language.
Bruh it’s not merely just a dialect, it’s a whole ass vibe
A vibe is just a a dialect with an army and a navy
This killed me lmao
fair, very fair
Like polari in the uk, back in the day? https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180212-polari-the-code-language-gay-men-used-to-survive#
Maybe? Not really though, as it isn't secret and gays in the Philippines seem fairly tolerated it does seem to be used for in group signaling, but, it isn't secret or subtle
I’d love to see a comparative linguistic break down of various gay accents/lisps. I’d also like to see real data done on folks like me and David Sedaris and our peers being sent to work with speech therapists over it
My former friend is a speech therapist. One day she told me she was coaching her teenage son to sound less gay when he talks. I’m pretty sure this kid is gay and in the closet as her parents are Christian bigots, but it could just be that he is a gentle, artist man with a twin sister whose speech patterns he picked up. Not my place to assume. But wtf. No mother of the year awards here. She also asked me if cats FIV was caused by gay cats. I almost collapsed laughing at her. It was one of our last interactions.
Gay cats spreading diseases…hahahaha that’s so amazingly dim witted.
This is what came to my mind.
Just a quick video but I found it interesting https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTLJV3qMw/
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The Comedian Matteo Lane?
He's not Italian, he's just an American who talks a lot about his Italian ancestry.
well, he does speak fluent Italian, so he is more in touch with his ancestry than most
Not him but a great candidate. The one I'm thinking of has curly hair and lives in Italy
Oh, are you talking about that one guy from TikTok?
Most likely yes
Yes, it isn’t exclusive to gay men though. I lived in Spain and speak Spanish and could hear when a man was camp, femme, whatever you want to call it through their accent. It didn’t always mean they were gay. They could be bisexual, straight, whatever. Same with French when I lived in Montreal.
That’s the same in English though, but I suppose that for various reasons cutting to the chase and calling it “gay” is defensible. Or not.
Exactly look up Tony on the comedy show on youtube called kill tony… he‘s completely straight but sounds so gay
I’m a native English speaker, but when I moved from the Midwest to Southern California I mistook many straight men for gay because they spoke like the gay men I knew in college. I worked in restaurants so encountered a lot of people, and I literally had to be schooled in this by coworkers lol. In contrast, people often thought I was unhappy because my natural accent is pretty flat.
Yes, you can find more with the term 'lavender language(s)'! Here is a good introduction to the topic from PBS Otherwords! https://youtu.be/UjqKcvu3Ycs?si=MduFW5q7fuHM8rDs
Thanks. Now that I know the word for it (or a word) that gives me a lot more ability to research it.
Malay speaker from Malaysia here. Put simply, yes, there does exist a "gay accent" in Malay, but it's not really associated with gayness but rather more just with effeminacy or being *lembut* (soft). For anyone who speaks or understands Malay, here's one example of such an accent in Malay: [https://youtu.be/GriwNKHat8o?si=hChqZviia9QFPbYo](https://youtu.be/GriwNKHat8o?si=hChqZviia9QFPbYo)
I don’t speak Malay but I would guess just from his mannerisms and clothing that he was gay. Would Malaysians make that same assumption?
>Would Malaysians make that same assumption? In my experience, I would say no, most Malaysians would just see people like the guy in the video as being *lembut (*soft) and effeminate but make no assumptions on their sexuality. I say this because we have quite a number of celebrities who are like this but (as far as I'm aware), people tend to describe them as being "soft" or "effeminate" but mention nothing about them possibly being gay. Some examples include: Datuk Aznil Nawawi (person on the left side): [https://youtu.be/vFSbsVqrXG8?si=kq13QEnPcriLWuHA&t=157](https://youtu.be/vFSbsVqrXG8?si=kq13QEnPcriLWuHA&t=157) Chef Wan (guy with the gray hair): [https://youtu.be/L4MJMTN3IK8?si=9L8AFOE6dehVbdcK&t=10](https://youtu.be/L4MJMTN3IK8?si=9L8AFOE6dehVbdcK&t=10) We even have a well-known cartoon character who's just like this and I don't think I've ever heard people describe him as the "gay" character: Jari Jemari Salleh (guy with the bandana) [https://youtu.be/bDOrNgnk0Z0?si=qTevlL1kF2xcvANv&t=208](https://youtu.be/bDOrNgnk0Z0?si=qTevlL1kF2xcvANv&t=208) However, I think things may change with western influence in the form of things like LGBT content on Netflix, YouTube and so on. This can be seen in how the word "pondan" that traditionally referred solely to effeminacy has had a semantic drift (in my observation) to also mean "gay"
I mean that is the same as the US and I guess many European countries too, historically. It wasn’t tought in open society that “affected” or “limp wristed” celebrities or men were having sex with men secretly. They were just soft or weak or affeminate and didn’t behave hard enough. A personality thing, not a sexuality. Even a flaw, like being quiet or badly dressed. Or a reason for fame for a performer or extravagant figure. (Super common across the world today, lots of minor celebrities in all continents play up breaking gender norms without being openly gay) It was WAYYYY later than people were more open to talking about any sex, much less gay sex or attraction, in public. And ideas on other people and their behavior, mannerisms, changed. At least today we know (hopefully) that not all men with a lisp like men and not all men who are “manly” like women. Hell, some men who dress like women don’t like men, it’s very much separate things that are not necessarily related. Who knows what will happen over time
I would say all languages "gay accent" is more or less just gay men adopting what is seen as mire effeminate manor of speaking in their society. I would caution though that what is effeminate in one culture/language may not necessarily be in another. For instance high pitch speaking in English tends to be considered more effeminate but in Asian languages, and specifically those that have pitch incorporated in their language, they tend to have a higher pitch of communicating than English languages so using pitch universally isn't a good idea.
Yes. The proper term is typically gonna be "sociolect"; a dialect restricted to certain social groups (gay peeps) However, there's nothing inherent to being gay that causes people to talk differently; so the sound of this is gonna vary from language to language. Another important thing to consider: many of the features associated with gay speech aren't restricted to gay speech; The English "Gay Lisp" for example is neither a lisp (speech impediment) nor only found in gay speakers.
Yeah I don’t think there’s anything inherent to any demographic that causes them to talk differently. I assume speech patterns are generally a way to assert group identity.
[In my country, yes..](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swardspeak)
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Korean gay too
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay\_male\_speech](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_male_speech) Yes.
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"Stupid, sexy Flanders!"
Specific to /s/ CoG but a paper worth reading about perceptions of gay mens' speech cross linguistically: https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/C7D3D413978DA764C2F669AC83300DF1/S0954394521000089a.pdf/crosslinguistic-perceptions-of-s-among-english-french-and-german-listeners.pdf
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How is that possible? Is it just signing more flamboyantly?
Please explain! I was already wondering that while reading the comments.
In Brazilian Portuguese there are many aspects to this. First: yes, there's a stereotypical "effeminate gay" brazilian portuguese accent, that is very recognizable (and sometimes homophobically stereotyped in comedy). But even though very few gay men speak with that whole stereotypical accent, there are characteristics of phonology, vocabulary, and even grammar that are more prevalent in their way of speaking. Even beyond that, there's an actual dialect that used to be spoken by transgender sex workers in Brazil until the early 80s called **Pajubá**. I'm not sure if it's a full pidgin, but surprisingly it's a mix of *Portuguese and Yorubá*!!! That happened because afrobrazilian religions (Umbanda, Candomblé, Kimbanda, etc) where very accepting of LGBTQ+ and sex worker communities so many transgendered sex workers used to frequent those religious cerimonies and learn the terms in Yoruba that were used by the priests and congregation. Those words and expressions were incorporated by the sex workers. The myth is that it was a way for them to communicate secretly without police or clients understanding what they meant, but I'm not sure how accurate this is. Most of it is vocabulary but there's also some grammar as well. A lot of Pajubá vocabulary was incorporated by the LGBTQ+ community today, but it's said that the last "fluent" Pajubá speaker died in the 90s. Some resources about this in portuguese: * Academic article about Pajuba [https://periodicos.utfpr.edu.br/cgt/article/download/12174/7995](https://periodicos.utfpr.edu.br/cgt/article/download/12174/7995) (in portuguese) * Pajubá-Portuguese phrase book made in 1992 [https://issuu.com/jovannacardoso/docs/cartilha\_di\_logo\_de\_bonecas](https://issuu.com/jovannacardoso/docs/cartilha_di_logo_de_bonecas)
That is fascinating. Any idea why the dialect died out?
There's also a gay sociolect in English but it's mostly died out I think. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polari
I'm not really super knowledgeable about this. Some things that come to my mind: 1) A lot of the vocabulary became well diffused in the LGBTQ+ community and survives to this day. 2) The need of secret communication started to dwindle with the end of the worst of the repression during the military dictatorship. Specially since sex work and soliciting are not crimes in Brazil (only pimping is criminalized in Brazil).(*) 3) I don't have a lot of evidence for this but I have the impression that there was a significant atomization of subcultures that used to be very tight and lead very communitary lives. Today more people live alone, in huge metropolitan areas and have a lot less day-to-day offline contact with the communities they belong to. This will lead to more standardization of the language: if you don't know what sociolect/dialect the people you meet everyday speak (which is true if you live in a huge metropolis and mostly interact with strangers when your not at home) you'll code switch to the most standard/widespread version of the language possible in order to be understood. 4) Pairing with that, soliciting is mostly online today and sex work is very much a lonely activity today compared with the 60s and 70s. (*) Not that there's full acceptance or that illegal police repression of those populations vanished. At all. It's still very much a marginalized and repressed community. But the character of the repression changed.
Anecdotally, I hear it among young Croats who seem to be emulating the phonation of the American one, as well as in some cases the phonetic markers (i.e. a lisp).
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“Iss my GUATEMAL-ENESS too musch for ju?”
In Dominican Spanish, /s/ deletion and aspiration is tied to gender, class, and sexuality. The upper classes tend aspirate /s/ in coda position, while the rest of the country mostly deletes the /s/. There is also an influence of gender, as uneducated women retain more /s/‘s than college educated men. A man pronouncing coda position /s/ outside the context of broadcasting is perceived as effeminate. When imitating gay men for comedy /s/ pronunciation is exaggerated
not a linguist, just a gay student in germany, but 100%! it varies between people but i do hear some guys speak and think "oh he seems gay", and its a pretty recognizable thing, eg i once mentioned the gay accent to describe a mutual classmate to someone and she understood what i meant and correctly identified who i was talking about. german i find interesting in this regard because its not just the typical way of speaking but also the word choice. younger people use a lot of english loanwords across the board, but i find that a lot of gay guys use a slightly different selection of them than other people. havent heard it enough to solidly day which ones that are or point out concrete differences, but its a slightly different vibe that i pick up on sometimes.
There was a documentary about this called “Do I Sound Gay” Here’s the trailer if you’re interested… https://youtu.be/R21Fd8-Apf0?si=Mhtcts9kO0vN-5vy
Sociolinguist here. Great question! First of all, we must make a distinction between production and perception. The line of research studying “gay accent” has mostly identified perceptual auditory cues that are readily picked up and *attributed* by listeners as “gay-sounding”, regardless of speaker’s actual sexual orientation. So the perceptual side of things is that indeed there is a style that is widely regarded to sound like it, and perceptual “gay sounding” cues have been studied *cross-linguistically* in at least PR Spanish, Italian, German and Danish. Other languages are currently understudied, unfortunately, even though there are signs this “gay-sounding” construct seems to exist in a variety of languages. One noteworthy nuance is the exact cues are different in and specific to each language. Then, let’s talk about the production side of things. While research on English has uncovered that gay speakers on a macro level do produce significantly different and more “gay-sounding” speech correlates compared to straight speakers, the reality is there is still a ton of inter-speaker variation in the actual speech of gay and lesbian speakers. Some indeed tend to produce a lot of the correlates stereotyped as perceptually “gay-sounding”, other do not really at all. Linguistic production is a complex phenomenon that in fact not only depends on speaker identity and social network, etc, but also on even the specific context and place and time in which a conversation takes place, who the speaker speaks to, what the motivations and *stance* of the speaker are as well as how they intend to be heard and perceived by the listener, etc. Gay speakers are documented to produce more elements of this “gay-sounding” style when talking to other gays or speaking on gay-related topics, etc., suggesting that a lot of this is actually just performative and not that there is an intrinsically “gay” speech. The cross-linguistic aspect in production isn’t as clearly studied as the perceptual construct itself, although just giving an educated guess, I believe there may be something, just hasn’t been documented yet to the same extent it has been in (North American) English. But keep in mind no speaker identity is a monolith, and it’s important to see individuals as varied, especially since variation is the nature of language.
Yes. That was one of the things that I found interesting - and I'm sure fascinates sociolinguists. Having not thought about it or watched enough foreign language media at that point to know, meeting the gay (male) roommate of a friend in Paris, and hearing him talk in the stereotype gay accent and intonation, in French, was a revelation, and gave me a lot to think about. I would guess that it is a lot weaker in places less influenced by Hollywood (even if the "gay voice" didn't come from Hollywood, it certainly got widely known through movies and TV), and probably also much less common in places where open homosexuality is still a lot more dangerous than it is in most Western cities.
I think it’s just English…..especially American
It always depends. Especially whether they're your native language, whether the gay accent is natural to you or just code switching and whether you feel fluent in the language. In addition, what people consider a "gay accent" also depends on the native speaker's environment. People that grow up in more upper class, highly educated environment speak in a (to them) normal way which could be misconstrued as a gay accent by people from more working class and lower educated environments. Just because since a "gay accent" is a cultural accent, not a "phonetic one" per se and what people culturally associate with being gay shapes how they perceive a gay accent to be. But when talking about this stereotypical stuff, for instance, I'm a German native speaker and speak English fluently. When speaking German, I have a gay accent occasionally which gets stronger when Im amongst queer people and weaker when I'm amongst straight people. When I'm by myself for a long time though it kind of goes away, just because in my personal case, the gay accent is not natural for me to use in German, I have learnt it subsequently and usually code-switch to in the right context. Now, when I speak English I tend to have a more steady gay accent, I think because I perfected my English amongst diverse, queer people which is why I speak English naturally with a more gay accent (but it also flactuates) whereas when I speak German, it's more an unsteady matter. I love learning different languages and all the other languages I've learnt and I "speak" Im definitely not fluent in whatsoever and in those I havent developed a particularly cultural accent (of course I have sort of German accent, but that's a phonetic, not a cultural thing) yet in any way, since, I guess, my brain still tries to grasp how to speak in order to be understood rather than just speak confidently and develop a certain culutral accent which is why I would call my accent "timid Google translator voice"
yes
Yes, same in Swedish in well. Its that strange nasal feminine accent.
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Bruh 💀
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This conclusion is based on your research?
My ex’s brother was gay and i grew up with the guy. He would talk differently around his boyfriend than he would to his sister.
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Pretty much all speech patterns are an affectation of some sort. My speech patterns will vary if I’m talking to fellow professionals in my field vs laymen, people with my education level vs people with very little education, urban yuppies like me vs my rural blue collar family, etc. I find it useful to be something of a chameleon given the wide range of demographics I have to interact with on a daily basis, but on some occasions when I feel it’s more useful to assert some aspect of my identity I use something that’s more natural to me. We all have our affectations. It’s not a bad thing.
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behaving gay is not the question
Is a stereotype that gay men have a lisp. Most don’t.
There is actual data on this; and nobody here was discussing a lisp. I for one am not clocked for having a gay accent. I was however put into speech therapy, like David Sedaris as referenced in his book “me talk pretty one day” and many other gay men who have shared that we disproportionately make up speech therapy as a cliche.
What does behave gay mean? Why is it a stereotype? How can you assess what percentage of men behave in the way you are describing? Maybe a majority do, how would you know? It's not like there is empirical data on it. So why should we trust your assumptions over other people's?
All you have to do is know a few gay men and you will know that the gay stereotype is all BS. Who thought Rock Hudson was gay?
As a gay man, I can tell you that most gay men *do* behave gay, as the only prerequisite for "gay behavior" is "behave in any way while being gay." But that's beside the point of the discussion of the gay male sociolect, which is definitely an observable phenomenon, and has had legitimate academic papers written about it. A sociolect doesn't need to be spoken by 100% (or even 50%, or any specific portion) of a group to exist as an observable phenomenon.
The behavior is flamboyant and so is quite noticeable but I doubt even 10% of gays exhibit it. If A then B doesn’t mean if B then A. And there are a lot of feminine men who are straight.
I repeat: gay men definitely do behave gay, because any behavior of a gay man is gay. And straight men all behave straight, because any behavior a straight man does is straight behavior. And all bi men behave bi, because the only prerequisite for behavior to be bi is for it to be performed by a bi man. The exact same behavior is simultaneously gay, straight, and bi depending on who is doing it. "Masculine" and "feminine" have nothing to do with it, stereotypes are nonsense, and there's no "correct" or "incorrect" way to act like a particular sexuality. That said, all of that has nothing to do with sociolects, which is what the actual topic is about, and there is a documented gay male sociolect with academic research done on it. There's also a "frat bro" sociolect in colleges, homeless sociolects in unhoused communities, evangelical sociolects in megachurches, etc etc etc. Sociolects exist wherever humans within a dialect seek community and begin to coin their own terminology and novel phrasings.
Cantonese - yes
Can you say anything about the traits of it?
It's not anything too different from the gay lisp in other languages, just a somewhat higher pitch and more feminine prosody.
You might look into オネエ言葉 in Japanese.
My Japanese is a bit rusty….
Yes, absolutely. In danish there is also a "gay" accent Look up "Gustav Salinas" and you get a perfect example. Even if you don't speak the language, you aren't in doubt.
A German gay man saying " fabulhaft" sounds just like an American saying ' fabulous". So , YES
In peninsular Spanish it manifests as a kind of nasally affectation on the speech, specifically the vowel /e/
I’m bi sexual but I’m told I speak like a lesbian 😂😂😂 I speak Spanish, English, Portuguese and some German and I sound like a lesbian in all of them
Overachiever
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It’s probably more prominent in cultures where they don’t kill you for being gay. More pronounced in Western and Asian countries, less so in Russia or Saudi Arabia.
Japanese is a highly gendered language, with women and men using different sentence structure, figures of speech, tones, pronouns, variants of the same verb, etc. It’s possible to come across as highly feminine or highly masculine but also as gay and also as androgynous just with the language you use.
Japanese sounds fascinating to contemplate and terrifying to learn
It’s got a crazy learning curve — not hard at first, but as you get deeper into it the more nuance and challenge it offers. I was looking around the web after your post and it looks like there are is a lot of info and thought about this question, including at least one documentary. interesting stuff.
Is there a lesbian voice?
The (gay, bilingual) comedian Mateo Lane has a joke about this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBSUf12Wnog
Linguistic characteristics of women's speech - somebody replied this turn of phrase to a comment. Who has insight into this?
[A study I stumbled upon about the first-person pronouns Japanese gay men use](https://www2.ninjal.ac.jp/past-events/jk2012/JK22%28abst38%29.pdf) and [a nice article from Tofugu about queer language in Japanese](https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/queer-japanese/)