[1] "Language", in this context, may refer to any aspect of spoken or written linguistic practices, including speech patterns and pronunciation, use of certain vocabulary, and, in a few cases, an elaborate alternative lexicon such as Polari.
Early studies in the field of LGBTQ linguistics were dominated by the concept of distinct "lavender lexicons" such as that recorded by Gershon Legman in 1941.
[6] Linguistics research, particularly within North American English, has revealed a number of phonetically salient features used by many gay men, some of which adhere to stereotypes.
Studies have repeatedly confirmed that male American English speakers are recognized as gay by their speech at rates above chance.
Relevant features include what is popularly known as a gay lisp: in fact, the articulation of /s/ and /z/ with a higher frequency and longer duration than average speakers.
Also, gay men may tend to lower the TRAP and DRESS front vowels, especially in "fun" or casual social situations.
Many gay speech characteristics match those that other speakers use when trying to speak especially clearly or carefully, including (over-)enunciating and widening the vowel spaces in the mouth.
[7] Research has also shown unique speech of gay men in other languages, such as Puerto Rican Spanish[8] and Flemish Dutch.
[9] Speech scientist Benjamin Munson confirmed such features among lesbians as the use of lower pitch and more direct communication styles found in previous studies,[10][11] plus more backed variants of back vowels,[12] but he noted too that differences between lesbians and straight women are "even more subtle" than differences between gay and straight men.
[13] In one English-language experiment, listeners were unable to identify female speakers as either lesbian or straight based solely on voice.
[19] Linguistic research on the language of transgender communities has explored the gendered phonetic aspects of the voice, specific gendered lexical items (pronouns, identity labels, terms of address), as well as specific discursive practices within trans communities (pronoun introductions, coming out stories, linguistic activism).
[21] Lal Zimman's 2012 doctorate dissertation followed fifteen transmasculine individuals from the San Francisco Bay Area in a long-term study focused on formant and fundamental frequency, for one to two years after the start of masculinizing hormone replacement therapy (HRT), concluding that all ten underwent a drop in fundamental frequency in the early stages of HRT but that social factors also affected many of the changes in voice and mannerisms.
[23] In the early twentieth century, the work of German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld introduced two terms that were popularly used for transgender people throughout the 1900s: transsexual and transvestite.
English examples of neopronouns go back to the 1800s with thon and e;[31] newer pronouns include ey, em, xe, and ve.
In Romance languages like French and Spanish, for example, affixes of nouns, adjectives and participles with gender agreement are changed, as well as pronouns and articles.
[37] Specialized dictionaries that record gay and lesbian slang tend to revolve heavily around sexual matters, which may reflect the publications' methodological assumptions about the hyper-sexuality of conversations among LGBTQ people.
[38] One study showed gay pornographic imagery to men and asked them to discuss the imagery, finding that conversations between gay men used more slang and fewer commonly-known terms about sexual behavior than conversations where both participants were heterosexual males or where the pair consisted of one heterosexual and one homosexual male.
[41][42] Faggot, often shortened to fag, is a usually pejorative term used chiefly in North America primarily to refer to a gay man or boy.
[44][48][49] Its use has spread from the United States to varying extents elsewhere in the English-speaking world through mass culture, including film, music, and the Internet.
[51] In the 1980s, however the LGBTQ community was increasingly viewed as an oppressed minority group, and scholars began to investigate the possibility of characterizing gay language use in a different way, influenced in part by studies of African-American Vernacular English.
[18][page needed] Shared ways of speaking can be used to create a single, cohesive identity that in turn help organize political struggle.
[58] Some members of a community may use stylistic and pragmatic devices to index and exaggerate orientations and identities, but others may deliberately avoid stereotypical speech.
The innovative speech norms that LGBTQ people may use within their communities of practice can be spread through institutions like schools where person of many classes, races, and genders come together.
This allows the gay man to establish solidarity with a community member previously unknown to him without having to disclose his orientation to a heterosexual and potentially hostile person.
However, inconsistency of language use between different sub-groups of the LGBTQ community, along with the existence of non-members who may be familiar with a gay mode of speech, can make such exploratory switching unreliable.
[18][page needed] George Lakoff explained the inaccuracy of metonymic models, through which people jump to conclusions without sufficient elaboration, giving rise to prototype effects, in his book Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things.
[67] The fact that there is no clean cut between the linguistic patterns of LGBTQ and straight people suggests that too many generalizations in the study of language and gender can be dangerous.
[69] Podesva (2004) is a paper that studies recordings of a gay medical student, whom he called "Heath", as he moved through different situations in the course of his everyday life.
[70] Furthermore, Podesva also examined the relationship between the California Vowel Shift (CVS) and the gay identity, again by investigating intra-speaker patterns in a single individual, Regan, as opposed to inter-speaker variation, and found that Regan, who is a self-identified gay Asian American, realized CVS differently depending on the context, whether it be a "boys' night out", "dinner with friend", or "meeting with supervisor".
Some baklas who move to the United States continue to use this code, but others abandon it, regarding it as a Filipino custom that is out of place abroad and replacing it with aspects of American gay culture.