Paper 145. A certain kind of gay identity: [s+] and contextually mediated variation in gay French and German men

Studies have shown /s/ variation to be a powerful social cue, indexing gender, social class, and age (Stuart-Smith 2007), as well as sexual orientation or non-normative masculinity (Pharao et al. 2014; Zimman 2017). Based on speech data from nineteen gay and straight French and German bilingual men this paper explores the social meaning of /s/ variation across three task types: an L2 (English) sociolinguistic interview, an L2 reading passage, and an L1 reading passage. Furthermore, I examine shifts in /s/ productions related to topics discussed within the sociolinguistic interview (i.e. LGBT+ community involvement, coming out, and demographics). Results reveal two subgroups of speakers: a group of gay speakers producing /s/ CoG averaging above 7,000Hz ([s+] speakers), and a heterogeneous group of gay and straight speakers with /s/ productions of approximately 5,500-6,700Hz ([s] speakers). Regardless of nationality, [s+] speakers not only exhibit significantly higher CoG values, but differences seen in task type and topic are shown to be greater for [s+] speakers than differences seen for [s] speakers. Furthermore, [s+] speakers produce significantly higher /s/ CoG when discussing their coming out stories and involvement within the LGBT+ community than topics of demographics. Speakers without this as a marked feature show no topic based style shifting. I argue that these results, specifically those seen in the conversational topic shifts, notonly indicate that /s/ is a socially meaningful marker for some gay French and Germanmen, but that these differences are highlighted by a process of ideological stance takingby the [s+] speakers to, at least in part, construct their gay identity. This [s+] variant isonly produced by some gay men as an act of constructing a contextually variable andspecific kind of gay identity. It is not necessarily the case that those gay speakers withoutthe [s+] variant are not linguistically constructing a gay identity, but rather /s/ is not afeature which is part of that linguistic construction. Conversely, the subtle shifts inconversational topic produced by the [s+] speakers, specifically relate to their own gayidentity and reveal an association between the social meaning established through thisstance taking and the linguistic construction of this identity. ReferencesPharao, N., Maegaard, M., Møller, J. S., & Kristiansen, T. (2014). Indexical meanings of[s+] among Copenhagen youth: Social perception of a phonetic variant in differentprosodic contexts. Language in Society, 43(01), 1-31.Stuart-Smith, J. (2007). Empirical evidence for gendered speech production: /s/ inGlaswegian. Laboratory phonology, 9, 65-86.Zimman, L. (2017). Gender as stylistic bricolage: Transmasculine voices and therelationship between fundamental frequency and /s/. Language in Society, 1-32.