I associate those “dark” /ʃ, ʒ, tʃ, dʒ/ sounds with U-RP (Upper Class Received Pronunciation) or at least “very posh and/or old RP.” I personally thought a discussion of those sounds was something missing from linguist J.C. Sarkozy’s and are generally less hi-f, but for example his emphatic savez-vous at 0:17 begins with an which is decidedly hi-f by cross-linguistic Dinora, Geoff: In this interview with French President Sarkozy, the first interviewer clearly has hi-f sibilants. Many (though not all) French speakers use hi-f sibilants without any “feminine” connotation. As I said in my earlier post, French is to my ear a hi-f language. So we find that hi-f sibilants turn up in linguistic systems without any sexual baggage at all. Generally, languages and accents have the sounds they do through a combination of universal properties and historical accident, not because they symbolize their speakers.
But this is just a displacement onto those languages of stereotypical attitudes and prejudices which cling, for better or worse, to the people who speak them. The general public may believe that French “sounds romantic”, that Italian “sounds emotional”, that German “sounds harsh”, etc. Of course most speech sounds are not sound-symbolic at all, but purely arbitrary. He not only “code-switches” between plain and hi-f sibilants, but uses the hi-f variety in an aggressive “macho” genre which has been accused of sexism and homophobia. This is why violins and bongos sound higher, cellos and kettle drums lower.īut then there’s Eminem. The sound-symbolic basis for this association can presumably be traced to the fact that females are on average smaller than males, and smaller physical bodies produce acoustically higher frequencies than larger ones. So hi-f sibilance is associated with heightened or stereotypical “femininity” independently of speaker sex or sexual orientation. Here he’s saying “In Essex it’s, I’d say it is pretty easy”:
A British example of a well-known gay man with hi-f sibilants is Harry Derbidge from the TV reality soap The Only Way Is Essex. I think most or many people “get” what the term refers to over a quarter of a million YouTube viewers seem to know what’s going on this satirical clip.Ĭlearly it’s true that hi-f sibilants are used by some gay men, throughout the English speaking world and, to some extent, beyond it. It’s this association, with what I called heightened or stereotypical “femininity”, that has given rise to the widespread description of hi-f sibilants or fronted s/z as a “gay lisp”. Struck me particularly because the long-standing association of hi-f and with “femininity” in the anglophone world seemed somewhat at odds with the machismo of rap culture. This follows from the Eminem’s style of rapping, which involves a constantly high-volume, harsh-voice delivery in a high pitch range with a narrow intonational repertory.)Īs I said in my other post, Eminem’s clearly hi-f sibilants in his rapping (One difference between Eminem’s speaking and rapping is “smeared” away by the long term average spectra, namely the greater consistency of the rapping, compared with the audible variability of the speaking. (This is why sounds are not well transmitted by conventional telephones, which have an upper frequency limit of about 3400 Hz.) But the rapping is obviously far higher still – in fact it extends above the 10kHz upper limit of the recordings I had to work on. The average range for rapping, in red, is clearly higher (shifted to the right) compared with the average range for speaking :Įminem’s speaking is acoustically typical for the plain of English speakers, with most of the energy concentrated above 4000 Hz. The spectrum of a sound shows where its acoustic energy is located in the frequency range, which is the horizontal axis in the following graph. To show this graphically, I made long term average spectra (LTAS) of the two groups of sounds. It’s easy to hear that the rap sibilants are “higher” than the speech sibilants.