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Article published In:
Journal of Language and Sexuality
Vol. 13:1 (2024) ► pp.98–123

“Like little Helsinki girls in the backseat of a tram”

Folk linguistic views on gay Finnish

 | University of Turku, Finland
This article explores the conceptions and attitudes that non-linguists have towards Finnish spoken by gay men. Combining folk linguistics and feminist theories, the study utilises interview and survey data for content analysis. The study finds that the main characteristics of speech viewed as “gay” – e.g. high pitch, atypical intonation patterns, nasality, non-canonical /s/ quality, use of affective adjectives – align with the speech stereotypes associated with girls and young women. The article suggests that, even though the attitudes explicitly communicated by the participants are mostly neutral, the language features associated with gay men show a strong relation to extra-linguistic gay stereotypes.
Keywords: Finnish, lavender language, gay men, folk linguistics, metalanguage, speech, language attitudes, stereotypes
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Research design
    • 2.1Theoretical framework and method
    • 2.2Data sets and research participants
      • 2.2.1Interviews with self-identified gay men
      • 2.2.2Survey for politically active youth
  • 3.Linguistic and extra-linguistic features associated with gay Finnish
  • 4.Attitudes towards gay Finnish
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Transcription conventions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 30 January 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.00032.lin
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