Language variation and change

Zac Boyd, Josef Freuhwald, and Lauren Hall-Lew (University of Edinburgh), 'Gay and straight French and German men use different /s/-es, but don't perceive them differently'.

Abstract: The indexical value of a linguistic form is typically considered in terms of its ability to signal. Speakers can recruit linguistic forms for the purpose of identity construction, irrespective of overt intent to do so (Eckert 2008). While explicit awareness is orthogonal to indexical function, listeners are at least expected to have some implicit association between the form and the function (Campbell-Kibler 2012). In this paper, we report on an apparent dissociation between speakers’ use of fronted /s/ in gay identity construction and listeners’ ability to recover that function. Boyd (2016) found that gay male French and German speakers were more likely to have fronter /s/ than straight French and German speakers, indicating /s/ fronting serves a similar function in these languages as it does in other languages (c.f. English: Zimman 2013; Levon 2006, 2014; Danish: Pharao et al. 2014; French: Hobart 2014; Hungarian: Rácz and Shepácz 2013; Spanish: Mack 2010; Walker et al. 2014). However, in a follow-up matched guise experiment carried out for this paper, French (N=32) and German (N=23) listeners were not more likely to rate voices with fronted /s/ as sounding gayer, while English listeners (N=27) were (Figure 1). However, the same French and German listeners rated guises with a higher pitch as sounding gayer. The /s/ results present an interesting dissociation between the indexical function of a form for constructing a gay identity, and listeners’ ability to report an association between that form and function.

Contact details

Dr Lauren Hall-Lew