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Sound Production and Accents: Podcast on "Do I Sound Gay?"

Posted: Tue Jul 28, 2015 1:24 pm
by zenmonkey
Was just listening to a podcast that I found interesting on sound production, accents and attitudes towards them.

Not sure I can embed, so here is the link: http://www.npr.org/2015/07/11/421470117 ... -sound-gay

In Do I Sound Gay?, director David Thorpe discusses the so-called "gay voice" and reveals his own attempt (with speech pathologist Susan Sankin) to sound "less gay." (broadcast July 7, 2015). He is the author of a recent documentary on the subject and that is where the title comes from.

I found it interesting in that the podcast also discussed glottal fry and upspeak. Personally I disagree with Ms. Sanskin (interviewed in the podcast) that glottal fry is somehow detrimental to the vocal mechanism - quite a few families of languages in the world have glottal phonemes.

A counter opinion on the podcast and possible stigma presented is voiced by Dr Khan. (with whom I agree strongly):
http://www.reed.edu/linguistics/khan/kh ... ygross.pdf

Still, an interesting podcast. Regionalisms and the attitudes towards them are also briefly discussed.

(As this might be a topic where people may consider attitudes towards language production as sensitive, please be respectful. Mods feel free to lock/clean, if things get out of hand).

Re: Sound Production and Accents: Podcast on "Do I Sound Gay?"

Posted: Tue Jul 28, 2015 11:15 pm
by AlexTG
The speech pathologist makes her living off of other people's insecurities and is trying to amplify those insecurities as much as possible.

I've been looking forward to the documentary. I hope it's generally more positive about sounding gay than this interview suggests. It looks like he at least interviews a bunch of people who are comfortable with their own gay voices.

Re: Sound Production and Accents: Podcast on "Do I Sound Gay?"

Posted: Wed Jul 29, 2015 6:39 am
by Doitsujin
There's also a Lexicon Valley episode about this interesting phenomenon: What Does It Mean to Sound Gay?.
Unlike the Fresh Air episode, the Lexicon Valley episode discusses scientific studies about this topic.

Re: Sound Production and Accents: Podcast on "Do I Sound Gay?"

Posted: Wed Jul 29, 2015 10:27 am
by zenmonkey
Doitsujin wrote:There's also a Lexicon Valley episode about this interesting phenomenon: What Does It Mean to Sound Gay?.
Unlike the Fresh Air episode, the Lexicon Valley episode discusses scientific studies about this topic.


Thanks - I also liked the start of that podcast on number production.

Interesting podcast - both podcasts conclude that sometimes there is a sexual orientation representation in spoken language.
The researcher's corpus can be found here: http://www.tc.umn.edu/~munso005/#sociophonetics