ON FRIDAY we previewed a post on the stereotypical "gay voice". We'll look at English today, and stereotypes for gay men only. "Gay voice", for the purpose of this post, is the kind of voice other people will perceive as making the speaker more likely to be gay. Obviously, not all gays have it, or anything like it; we are talking about perceptions.

There are a few features to stereotypical gay speech. One is pitch. All things equal, the higher a voice, the more effeminate a voice sounds, for the obvious reasons. The second is pitch variability. The more up and down a voice goes in conversation, the more likely it is to be perceived as "excitable", feminine and gay in men.

Third is the vowels. A recent paper in American Speech argues that American gay male voices tend towards the vowels of California. I can't get access to the paper, but the perceptive Ben Trawick-Smith at Dialect Blog has. He describes the California Vowel Shift thus

The vowel in 'bid' shifts toward the vowel in 'bed,' 'bed' shifts toward 'bad,' and 'bad' toward 'bod' (how very Californian). Meanwhile, the vowels in 'bud,' 'bode' and 'boot' all shift frontward.

Mr Trawick-Smith found that the paper confirmed something he had already noticed himself about the Californian-ness of the gay accent. It's not clear why this would be.

Finally, there is the much-misdescribed "gay lisp". Gays do not replace the s-sound with a th-sound. But the gay accent does tend to "s-fronting". [s] is normally pronounced with the tongue at the alveolar ridge behind the teeth. But if you gradually move your tongue forward towards the th-sound, stopping halfway, your tongue will be behind your teeth, and the pitch will get higher. This fronted [s] is more common among younger American women and gay men than it is among straight men, and is a staple of gay-voice stereotypes.

The reason the lisp is often written with a th-sound is that it's pretty impossible to write a fronted [s] with a normal keyboard. Since it is part-way towards th-, listeners may even perceive it as a th-, even though it's not. The invisible line being crossed is not on the back of the speaker's teeth, but in the listener's brain. If the speaker gets far enough away from "normal" s, the speaker hears it as the next-closest sound in the phonemic repertoire. Hence the inaccurate, but common, use of th-for-s in descriptions of gay speech.