Characteristics
Several speech features are stereotyped as markers of gay male identity: careful pronunciation, wide pitch range, high and rapidly changing pitch, breathy tone, lengthened fricative sounds, and pronunciation of /t/ as /ts/ and /d/ as /dz/ (affrication).
The "gay sound" of some gay men seems to some listeners to involve the characteristic "lisp" involving sibilants (/s/, /z/, /ʃ/, and the like) with assibilation, sibilation, hissing, or stridency.
Professors Henry Rogers and Ron Smyth at the University of Toronto investigated this.
According to Rogers, people can usually differentiate gay- and straight-sounding voices based on certain phonetic patterns. "We have identified a number of phonetic characteristics that seem to make a man’s voice sound gay," says Rogers. "We want to know how men acquire this way of speaking."
A study at Stanford University involving a small sample group investigated claims that people can identify gay males by their speech and that these listeners use pitch range and fluctuation in deciding. Results were inconclusive:
Although he found that listeners could distinguish gay from straight men, he failed to find any convincing empirical differences in pitch between these two groups. This study is representative of others that have failed to find concrete differences in the speech of gay and straight men.
In a similar study of female speakers, it was found that listeners could not tell lesbian speakers from heterosexual speakers. Other studies of lesbian identity do make references to voice use by lesbians typically using lower pitch and more direct communication styles.
Peter Renn's undergraduate study (which won a George H. Mitchell Undergraduate Award) demonstrated that gay-stereotyped speech more strongly correlates with childhood gender-nonconformity than with sexual orientation and proposed that gay-stereotyped speech is actually childhood-gender-nonconformity speech that has become associated with male homosexuality only by proxy.
Read more about this topic: Gay Lisp