To be fair, since they’re heterosexual you wouldn’t come across them (or any other way) at all.
Heh.
Actually, the kind of dude who’s said in Northern Spain (Castilian isn’t the only dialect which has the “lisping” sounds) to have “more feathers than a poultry farm” combines the droopy hand with affected speech (they tend to sound like the local version of Valley Girl: exaggerated expresivity, lots of osea, batted lashes, they don’t say “I have to get toilet paper” but “I am in need of purchasing some Scottex” because, honey, if it ain’t Brand it ain’t worth buying, osea) and with, shall we say, extra lispy sounds. I’ve known some to purposefully separate the b and v sounds, making the v slightly fricative (Antonio Gala comes to mind, I remember him claiming that the rest of the then-500M-speakers or so did it wrong; I suspect some of the others are imitating him even if they don’t know it - and Gala has enough feathers for Chick-fil-A).
There certainly seems to be a “gay intonation” (I think of it as nasal), but I never associated lisping with it. My own WAG is that it is like any in-group. A way to distinguish themselves among themselves. Listen to a group of mathematicians and you will hear distinctive speech patterns. You join a community and consciously or not adopt the speech you hear. Move from LA to PA and the same thing happens, if you are young enough. My wife can, but mostly won’t, “talk Brooklyn”. I was once at a talk by Richard Feynmann who delivered it in a thick Brooklyn accent (he was from Brooklyn, but spent most of his adult life in the west). When questions came he forgot himself and spoke Californian.
For those who don’t know, speaking Spanish with a lisp is part of a non-gay-specific regional accent in Spain. I’ve spoken with a Spaniard who spoke Spanish with a lisp. I don’t.
Effeminate thought patterns?
I believe that at some point the King of Castille had a lisp, and folks began speaking like that to suck up to him. 
Although it sounds like a lisp to us, it isn’t really. In much of Spain, the letter “s” is still pronounced “s”; it’s only “z” and soft “c” that take the “th” pronunciation. Someone who lisps would pronounce them all as “th.”
See here.
Frankly, it appears to be an affectation that gay men use to identify one another. As you may note when you speak with a number of gay men, the more "masculine"among them usually do not affect an effeminate tone of voice. in fact, being seen as “fem” is not desirable in large quarters of the gay community.
I can see where it might be necessary to effect this effeminate speech pattern as it might be difficult for some people to recognize other gays without it. It seems similar to lesbians cutting their hair short and dressing in a masculine manner/
I’m similar. I don’t even think my voice sounds that fem, but I get called Ma’am on the phone all the time and in recordings my voice sounds at least an octave higher than I hear it in my head.
Again though, some of us have sounded that way since we were kids and knew nothing of ‘gay’. I would be more inclined to believe that it started with people that were naturally that way and has developed into something that other gay guys have imitated/picked up on/what have you.
I speak with a stereotypical downward inflection at the end of sentences (Remember Snagglepuss?). I’ve been told that I always spoke that way, even as a young kid, though nobody else in the family does it. People don’t believe me when I say I don’t hear it at all when I speak, and I admit it’s strange that I don’t. And there’s nothing else gay or effeminate about my speech; my singing voice is deep basso. But it’s interesting that this vocal quirk is enough to tell people I’m gay.
Most gay men that I have met usually don’t pretend that their “effeminate voice” is a natural phenomenon. Most will freely admit that they affect it and often use a “normal” tone in situations where they don’t want to be perceived as being gay or where “sounding gay” might cause them issues. Sort of “butching up” if you will.
Anyway, who knows why people do it? Like I was saying, it appears to be a social phenomenon to assist gays in determining who is gay and who is not. If it’s NOT that, then it certainly resembles that.
Actually, that’s not fully accurate due to being incomplete.
Speaking Spanish in such a way that S is pronounced S and Z is similar to TH in “thick” is part of a non-gay specific regional accent in Spain and other Spanish-speaking countries. Speaking Spanish in such a way that both are similar to TH (except for final S which is S or disappears) is a different set of accents. Speaking so that both are S is yet another set, and then there’s the set where S is pronunced TH and Z is pronounced S. We’ve got more variants but they’re rarer (such as that one where some final -S sounds like the CH in loch).
Having a lizp iz when dey can’t pdonounce an s to zave deir livez.
[QUOTE=panache45]
I speak with a stereotypical downward inflection at the end of sentences (Remember Snagglepuss?). I’ve been told that I always spoke that way, even as a young kid, though nobody else in the family does it…
[/quote]
There was a kid growing up who spoke the same way, but his actions were also more… flamboyant for a lack of a better word. He spoke and behaved like a girl, but even then, even more girlish than the average girl. He wasn’t femming it up, and actually insisted he did not have the affectations everyone else noticed and that he was actually straight.
This was in a very small town with no gay culture. I believe he has since come out, but it wasn’t really a shock to anyone (even the parents when we were growing up ‘knew’ and he was the only little boy allowed to play unsupervised with the girls.) He would have had no exposure, or at least no additional exposure beyond what all us other kids had, to how gays ‘should talk/act’, and yet he did it to the T. This has always been something I’ve wondered about, because I just couldn’t get how he came to talk/act in that manner, when, knowing his home life, his upbringing was similar to most of the rest of us. He had a similar family environment, was in all the same classes as we were, yet the boys and most of the girls did not behave like he did at all.
It’s funny that this thread happens to be current right now. Today I heard this guy on the radio and I have to admit, I have made some inferences. Virulent anti-gay Christian activist? Who talks like that? It’s possible he’s straight, but I would not be surprised to hear of someone lifting his luggage sometime in the future.
In the 2009 thread, Walpurgis introduced me to the term “sociolect”, a very useful term indeed. When I learned the definition, I realized that I have one. I definitely sound like a computer geek, and pretty much any American native English speaker would ID me as such. I am unsure what caused it, if it is a result of my educational experience, or reading technical literature, or other media exposure to computer geeks. But it immediately increased my empathy for gay men with stereotypical “gay” speech patterns. I realized they were probably no more consciously speaking that way than I was.
This is my hypothesis:
Talking “effeminately” can appear naturally in the male population. It’s not always about “lisping”, but intonation (more variability in pitch) and inflection (emphasizing certain words, as in, “That is SO wonderful! You are my BEST friend!” After teasing and a desire to “fit in” most boys will modify their speech, either consciously or subconsciously. Some fraction will not, either because they are resistant to peer pressure or because they do not recognize how they speak differently. This is independent of sexual orientation. I too have met heterosexual guys who still speak “effeminately”.
Then I think there are some guys who take on the “accent” as an affectation, perhaps around adolescence. I knew a guy like this. In elementary and middle school, he spoke like a “normal” guy (sorry, can’t think of a better word). In high school, not only did he weigh his blaccent more heavily (he was raised by a white woman, so it had been subtle or non-existent previously), but he started speaking a little bit more effeminately. No lisping or anything really stand-out, but his spoke just a little faster, with a little bit more of an indignant head bop when excited. Also, he’d suck his teeth and do other vocal mannerisms that were more familiar amongst the girls. Like saying “girl” and “chile” a lot. Now, I don’t know if the guy was gay, but I would not be surprised in the least if he came out.
There was a viola player in my high school orchestra who also spoke effeminately. He probably caught hell because of it, but he was one of those “Oh no you di’n’t!” type of people, so I’m thinking he was resistant to all efforts to change him. Still don’t know if he ever came out. But would not be surprised.
I think some girls go through similar shifting. As a kid, I had a really deep voice for some reason and I’d get teased horribly about it. But now I rarely get accused of having a “man voice”. If anything, I get accused of having a frail “grandmother” voice. So something happened, and I don’t think it was a conscious change.
It’s cultural: completely affected and not innate.
I’m a former teacher aide, and my job was working with children aged 5-7 with speech impediments. Some of those kids (male and female) lisped and prattled exactly like stereotypical effeminate gays. I helped teach some of them to stop doing it. There are many reasons why a child might have an “affected” speech pattern, including natural random variation, and I have zero doubt that it has zero correlation with adult homosexuality.
Children that talk in cutesy ways often do so because their parents thought it was cute and encouraged it. They later have to un-learn it and learn to talk normally. I’ve personally dealt with children who had no physical speech problem and could talk perfectly normally when taught how to do so but lisped uncontrollably because that’s how they learned to speak, through positive reinforcement. Others just randomly picked it up, and some had genuine speech pathology issues. All of the children who had no physical problem could be taught to speak normally, but - as with anything - unlearning and relearning things can only be done with effort and motivation.
A few children who talk “like that” will - randomly - grow up to be gay. That’s because a certain percentage of any randomly selected group of children will grow up to be gay. The majority of children with “effeminate” speech patterns will grow up to be non-gay, and most of them will learn to talk in an unaffected way.
The “effeminate” speech patterns of some adult gay men are an adult affectation, even if a few of them have, indeed, been talking “like that” since early childhood. Co-incidence, not correlation.
Good topic-I am fascinated by accents.
If I moved to London, would I start to sound like an englishman?
or would I retain my Boston accent?
Depends, how good are you at picking up accents?
Mine changes a lot (sometimes mid-sentence!) and I acquire new accents easily. My Italian coworkers found it hilarious that after a month in their factory my Italian was still more Itañolo than anything else yet whenever I managed a full sentence in Italian it was absolutely with their accent; I’ve had to apologize to Argentinian coworkers who thought I was making fun of theirs… yet living in Seville didn’t give me a Seville accent: it gave me a Getafe accent, which to my own ear is the ugliest accent in all of Hispanity.