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Local Area Info: Gay male speech

Gay male speech, particularly within North American English, has been the focus of numerous modern stereotypes, as well as sociolinguistic studies. 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. One feature of the speech is sometimes known as the "gay lisp", though researchers acknowledge that it is not technically a lisp. Research does not support the notion that gay speech entirely adopts feminine speech characteristics, but, rather, that it selectively adopts some of those features. Gay speech characteristics appear to be learned ways of speaking, though their origins and process of adoption by men remain unclear.

Linguists have attempted to isolate exactly what makes gay men's English distinct from that of other demographics since the early 20th century, typically by contrasting it with straight male speech or comparing it to female speech. In older work, speech pathologists often focused on high pitch among men, in its resemblance to women, as a defect. Since the gay community consists of many smaller subcultures, it is likely inaccurate to presume all gay male speech falls under a single linguistically homogeneous category.

The gay lisp is one manner of speech stereotypically associated with gay speakers of American English, and perhaps other dialects or languages. It involves a marked pronunciation of sibilant consonants (particularly /s/ and /z/). Speech scientist Benjamin Munson and his colleagues have argued that this is not a mis-articulated /s/ (and therefore, not technically a lisp) as much as a hyper-articulated /s/. Specifically, gay men are documented as pronouncing /s/ with higher-frequency spectral peaks, an extremely negatively skewed spectrum, and a longer duration than heterosexual men. However, not all gay American men speak with this hyper-articulated /s/ (perhaps fewer than half), and some carefully speaking men who identify as heterosexual also produce this feature.