Transfer of stylistic phonetic variables indexing sexuality in second language contexts

Abstract

This paper reports on a study that analyzes how a sequential bilingual speaker (L1 Mexican Spanish, L2 American English) uses stylistic phonetic variation in different speech types during an interview (short answer, spontaneous speech, dramatic anecdote, reading) to construct a dynamic gay persona. There are many stylistic variables that can interact when an individual is creating a persona in an interaction, and this becomes even more complex when analyzing L1 speech as well as L2 speech as there are two collections of stylistic phonetic variables (indexical fields) interacting from two different cultural ideologies available to the interlocutors. It is problematic to assign one distinct variable to an identity, such as gay, as it homogenizes a diverse social group of individuals and underestimates members' ability to manage perceptual salience of their identity as a gay individual based on context and social pressure(s). While the field of Lavender Linguistics (language use associated with the LGBTQ community) has shown that there are many resources that can be used to "sound gay," this case study focuses on how a speaker stylistically creates a gay persona throughout the interview through stylistic variation of two principle variables: 1) word-final /s/ duration, and 2) center of gravity of word-final /s/.