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When we speak, we indicate many aspects of our identity, but how do people do this in highly gendered spaces?
This study investigated how straight and non-straight women, who were or were not members of a football club, produced the sound /s/.
The study explores the interplay of gender, sexuality and identity effects on accent.
The sound /s/ is a useful sociolinguistic variable as there is a way to measure differences in how the sound is produced using centre of gravity: higher values reflect a more ‘hissy’ /s/ produced with the tongue further forward in the mouth.
Studies have shown that, on average (Podesva & Van Hofwegen, 2016; Hazenberg 2016):
women produce /s/ with higher centre of gravity than men;
gay men produce /s/ with a higher centre of gravity than straight men;
gay women produce /s/ with lower centre of gravity than straight women.
Professional women’s football was not recognised in the UK until 1971 (thefa.com), so the women in this study probably had to push back against older attitudes to play the sport. Being a footballer or being sporty is probably also a big part of their identity.
Socio-indexical features can serve to mark us as belonging to a particular group. Some features of speech can be socio-indexical in how they mark us as being e.g. straight or gay. The sound /s/ is socio-indexical in that speakers tend to use a different tongue position to mark gender and sexuality.
Does the pronunciation of /s/ act as a marker of identity across both club membership and individual sexuality?
Figure 1: Illustration of how /s/ looks when visualised acoustically.
Sociolinguistic interviews were recorded with 22 women from Yorkshire: 9 were members of the same local football club and 13 were not. The non-members included both straight and gay individuals.
Acoustic measurements were taken in examples of the sound /s/ as a measure of tongue position, knwon as centre of gravity. The results were compared across straight versus gay speakers and across club members and non-members.
Figure 2: Results for /s/ centre of gravity across sexuality and group membership.
Average /s/ centre of gravity was lower for gay women than for straight women.
Members of the football club had a lower /s/ centre of gravity than non-members.
Identity as 'sporty' overlaps and interacts with the expression of sexuality.
This study is an example of ‘third wave’ sociolinguistics: it explores the effects of speech communities which may not map directly onto simple combinations of sociolinguistic factors (such as age, gender, or sexuality).
Workshop talk (video) [will be posted a few weeks after the workshop]
Workshop talk (slides) [coming soon]