May 16, 2016
A New York Times short documentary explores how our role models during language and speech development influence the way we speak into adulthood.
American journalist and documentary filmmaker David Thorpe decided to investigate some theories about the stereotype of what a “gay voice” is. First, it is important to bring up a caveatpresented by himself Thorpe: It is important to consider that there is no such thing as a fundamentally gay voice. Someone's voice is not proof of their sexuality.
The documentary tells the story of two men, one with a stereotypically homosexual way of speaking – Kris – and the other with a stereotypically heterosexual way of speaking – Matt.
Kris talks about being mistaken for a woman on the phonein about98% of the time and how his friends comment that his voice “sounds gay”. Matt talks about how he speaks very similarly to his father and brothers, with whom he regularly plays football. He considers that he “sounds straight”. Contrary to what the stereotype dictates, however, Kris is heterosexual and Matt is homosexual.
Linguist Benjamin Munson of the University of Minnesota explains this phenomenon:
“Think about the language acquisition environment of the infant, the child. We are all presented with many models of how to speak. We listen to men, women, children our own age, adults, and inall theseinteractions we have different opportunities to emulate different aspects of these people’s speeches.”
Kris was raised almost exclusively by women. Women were the majority in his family, and he spent most of his life surrounded by female figures. Matt, on the other hand, comes from a predominantly male family. In his family environment, surrounded by his four brothers and his father, a sexist and, in his words, unfair logic prevailed – often, after lunch, the men in the family would go out to play football while the women stayed behind to take care of the cleaning.
As linguist Ron Smyth of the University of Toronto Scarborough says, it's not that a child who identifies as gay is saying 'I want to sound like a woman', but rather that he is identifying with some model of a way of speaking and imitating that way.
It makes a differencewho are the modelsin the way of speaking because men and women have micro variations in the pronunciation of words. So when a boy emulates his mother's way of speaking, the stereotype considers his voice “effeminate” and links it to his sexuality. This is a generalizationwrong, because, as we noted above, someone's voice is not evidence of their sexuality – but it can reveal which figures were important to a person during the period of oral language acquisition.
Watch the full video here: