Beyond binary gender: creaky voice, gender, and the variationist enterprise
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Published:2022-07
Issue:2
Volume:34
Page:215-238
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ISSN:0954-3945
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Container-title:Language Variation and Change
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language:en
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Short-container-title:Lang Var Change
Author:
Becker Kara,Khan Sameer ud Dowla,Zimman Lal
Abstract
AbstractThis paper promotes a sophisticated treatment of gender in variationism through a large-scale quantitative analysis of creak, a nonmodal voice quality stereotypically associated with women in US English. An analysis of our gender-diverse corpus, including cisgender, transgender, and nonbinary individuals, finds that gender does not predict variation; all gender groups produce high rates of creak. However, gender does interact with style: all speakers use more creak in interview speech compared with read speech, but some groups style-shift more than others, suggesting that gender remains a relevant factor in capturing how creak is deployed as a resource in social practice. We use this analysis to advocate for a move beyond the gender binary in quantitative descriptions of sociolinguistic variables and call for the greater inclusion of trans+ individuals in sociolinguistics.
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Subject
Linguistics and Language,Education,Language and Linguistics