WHAT’S IN A WORD?

DO YOU TALK GAY? IS THERE A DYKE-Y DIALECT? DO YOU OUT YOURSELF EVERY TIME YOU OPEN YOUR MOUTH? STEVE BUSTIN WONDERS IF YOU CAN REALLY TELL SOMEONE IS GAY BY THE WAY THEY SPEAK AND THE WORDS THEY USE

Do you speak gay?

“Of course there’s a gay language,” says Professor Bill Leap from The American University, where he co-edits the Journal of Language and Sexuality and organises the annual Lavender Linguistics Conference. “Ask any gay man and he’ll tell you that he can walk down a street or be in a bar or restaurant and hear someone speak and he knows, ‘he’s gay’!

“The specific linguistic features could be any number of things, not just the tone of voice or lisp. They may include choice of words or innuendo, or the way the topic is framed or use of a specific metaphor or references to place. The point is, we hear language and we associate it with gay identity.

“Cruising used to begin with these signals, before the days of Grindr and gay chatrooms. Homophobic violence still begins with these signals.”

Paul Baker, Professor of English Language at Lancaster University and author of Fantabulosa, a dictionary of Polari and gay slang, isn’t so sure.

“It’s a tricky one but no, I don’t think there’s such a thing as gay language, just as there’s no such thing as women’s language or black language.

Gay people are not all the same so they don’t speak the same language – or one that is different to straight people.

“There are certain types of language associated with gay people but not all gay people use them and those that do don’t use them all the time. It tends to be very context aware, e.g. with gay friends, in a bar, but not used with your family at home.

“There’s a theory in linguistics called convergence. When people are together they want to show that they’re together so they start converging their language towards a norm, using similar words or concepts, and there’s certainly an argument that gay people are different to heterosexuals so need a different language to talk about certain things.

“For example, ‘cruising’ is a word that is perfectly acceptable to gay men that might have negative connotations in ‘normative’ society. ‘Rimming’ is another word that’s simply not used by straight people.”

So do gay men and women invent language or words in order to communicate with each other? The obvious example is Polari, the “secret” language used by some gay men in the mid 20th century that has left its mark on modern gay speech.

Did you know, for example, that ‘naff’ comes from Polari and originally stood for ‘Not Available for F**king’ – i.e. straight, and therefore boring and untrendy – which has become its wider meaning more recently?

Dr Lucy Jones, an Assistant Professor in Sociolinguistics at the University of Nottingham and author of Dyke/Girl: Language and Identities in a Lesbian Group, says that the need for a ‘secret’ language like Polari has disappeared.

“We needed Polari because we needed to be safe and secure in a world where it was illegal to be gay, we needed a secret code. Now we need a way of feeling part of – and identifying with – a community. Language that marks us out is important and we can use it to identify other gay people by using or listening for a reference to a particular person or bar – if the listener isn’t gay they’re not going to understand the reference.

“It’s not necessarily about specific words, either. It can be about the way we refer to things or the jokes that we tell. There’s research that shows that if you put a bunch of LGBT people who don’t know each other in a room, they’ll start drawing on crude stereotypes such as lesbians wearing comfortable shoes or liking cats as it’s a way of finding something in common.” Is gay language still appearing and developing? Paul Baker thinks it is: “The internet is a huge driver of the language we use. Social media such as Grindr forces people to connect with people they don’t know well and they need to be able to understand each other very quickly. So often these days it’s about abbreviation as people want to say things very quickly. It’s interesting, however, how similar conversation openers always are online – we all use the same forms of greeting language.” Lucy Jones sees linguistic change being driven by political correctness: “Gay people can use the words that feel comfortable to them – they don’t need to be politically correct as they were the ones being marginalised in the first place, but in the mainstream, language has changed as people want to use the ‘right term’. A lot of people refer to ‘LGBT people’ but I don’t think many gay people would see themselves as ‘LGBT’.

“As homophobia has become less tolerated, the words ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ have replaced more negative words in the media. An older generation who might have referred to ‘queens’ and ‘faggots’ are less likely to do so because they don’t hear others doing it. ‘Lesbian’, in particular, used to be a dirty word, in soap operas, for example, but now it’s neutral and no longer loaded in the same way.

“Words like ‘lesbian’ can be very clinical or official, however, which is why gay women might use ‘dyke’ to refer to each other, but if someone from outside the community uses that, it can be offensive.”

Paul Baker agrees, saying that we’re empowering ourselves by claiming certain words back:

“You’re taking ownership of that word and taking power away from those using it to hurt you. It’s an effective strategy but its been used against us as well, such as the word ‘gay’, which is now being used to mean something bad and has been taken back off us. So it’s not just gay people who do it but we’ve got lots of pejorative words we need to get back!”

“Language that marks us out is important and we can use it to identify other gay people by using or listening for a reference to a particular person or bar”