Beyond binary gender: creaky voice, gender, and the variationist enterprise

Abstract This paper promotes a sophisticated treatment of gender in variationism through large-scale quantitative analysis creak, nonmodal voice quality stereotypically associated with women US English. An our gender-diverse corpus, including cisgender, transgender, and nonbinary individuals, finds that does not predict variation; all groups produce high rates creak. However, interact style: speakers use more creak interview speech compared read speech, but some style-shift than others, suggesting remains relevant factor capturing how is deployed as resource social practice. We this to advocate for move beyond the binary descriptions sociolinguistic variables call greater inclusion trans+ individuals sociolinguistics.