Fresh Air and Sounding Gay
In a new quasi-biographical documentary film titled Do I Sound Gay?, director David Thorpe explores both the idea that there’s a quantifiable way to describe the difference between the speech of gay men and straight men, as well as his own struggle with being perceived as “sounding gay”. Now, a recent interview featured during the NPR program Fresh Air has sparked some controversy within a segment of the linguistics community, centred around a pair of open letters (here and here) to show host Terry Gross.
The authors — phoneticians Sameer ud Dowla Khan of Reed College and Lisa Davidson of New York University — don’t take issue with the subject matter as an area worthy of discussion; the first letter even lists off a dozen or so linguists and speech scientists who are engaged in relevant research. Rather, they point out that the conversation travelled down an unexpectedly unscientific path, especially when the spotlight fell on speech pathologist Susan Sankin, who worked with Mr. Thorpe on both his voice and the film.
Now, as tenants of the Ling Space, we certainly have no shortage of opinions about language. But as linguists, we also understand the value of a scientific approach. In other words, we feel it’s important to mark a clear boundary between one’s personal, political, and philosophical views about a topic, and what the science has to say. And it looks like a blurring of that line is just what our conscientious objectors had a problem with. Specifically, while the interview does provide insight into the phonetic characteristics that some might use when constructing a specific social identity, and that others might use in identifying someone as belonging to that social group, Ms. Sankin draws a very soft line between fact and opinion.
During the conversation she disparages “upspeak”, also called “uptalk”, which is a rise in pitch near the ends of utterances (as in questions, but used in non-question contexts); she calls it her pet peeve, she compares it to the common cold, and she even goes on to speculate about how detrimental it is to society’s perception of women (you can read Chad Nilep’s fairly comprehensive deconstruction, here). She also takes the time to scoff at the occurrence of vocal fry — essentially, speaking with a creaky voice — by describing it as harmful for the vocal folds. (While it is true that this type of speech can exacerbate certain medical conditions, this does not mean it bears a causal relationship with them).
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with having preferences. But recognizing them as such, especially when taking on the role of a science communicator with relevant expertise, is super important. This is even more true when dealing with matters relating to groups which have been historically marginalized (e.g., the LGBT community). Moreover, it’s important to note that when we look at our preferences using the right level of abstraction, it’s so much more obvious how arbitrary they really are. Many linguists might be able to pick out a favourite vowel, but they still know it can basically be broken down into a collection of numbers: the vocal frequencies that stand out the most, above all the rest, when pronouncing any given sound. These values, called formants, change from one vowel sound to the next, giving them their signature; when looked at this way, it gets a lot harder to claim that <235, 2100> is somehow “better” than <360, 640>!
Applying that same logic to the topic of “gay speech”, we can see how the research being done, when presented in the right way, can potentially help dissolve prejudice, instead of reinforcing it. For example, a 2005 paper by Benjamin Munson studied whether formants played a role in identifying oneself as gay, or identifying others. Among the many findings, he discovered that there did seem to be a connection between the first formant of low front vowels (ɛ and æ) and whether male subjects identified themselves as gay; it even seems that this feature might allow others to do the same. But there’s no value judgment here: like having a favourite vowel, when you break things down into their numbers and what people are attending to, it gets really tricky to argue that a smaller formant is somehow superior to a bigger one, even if it does hold a special place in your heart! ^_^
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