Challenging norms of gender and language

In this special issue of Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics, we engage in this productive and growing conversation by bringing together ongoing work on gender-inclusive language as well as the linguistic practices among trans and non-binary communities. Each of these papers offers a unique perspective on the ever-diversifying nuances of language, and together challenge established norms of language use and research practices.

“What do they say in Quebec?”

This paper examines how non-binary French-speakers in Quebec express their gender identities in speech. I argue that reformist efforts regarding neutral French should include increased attention to how neutral French is done in informal spoken Quebec French, as I examine how current recommendations based on spelling can fail to be taken up in speech, and how regional varieties can sometimes require different prescriptions. Based on a preliminary field study with eight participants who are part of this community of practice, I find that participants did not use any audible neologisms, such as the ones recommended for writing and for other varieties. Not only did they all use gendered language to refer to non-binary referents, although at a much lower frequency than for binary referents, but they also used gender-avoidance strategies in most cases. I also show that third person clitics seem to be the word category most resistant to neutralization or avoidance for speakers of this variety. I argue that these results point to the development of two distinct systems of neutral French, one for speech and one for writing.

Un regard sur le français inclusif canadien dans une journée de Twitter

This paper looks at the variation of typographical procedures and agreements related to inclusive French (FI) on the microblogging system Twitter in Canada. The corpus used includes 464 tweets geo-localized in Montreal, Ottawa and Quebec and published on May 12th, 2020. They were sorted into cases of simple inclusion (IS), uniform agreement (AU) and mixed agreement (AM). The results showed that IS (57%) is the most preferred approach. When the tweets presented more than one FI mark, the preferred structure was AM (27%). When compared to the 15% of AU cases, we might conclude that uniform agreement is not common in this corpus. The analysis of AM tokens showed a gradual decrease in agreement marks throughout a given tweet. The preferred FI typographical procedures in this corpus (complete doublets, abbreviated doublets with parentheses, and epicene forms) are consistent with the recommendations of the Office québécois de la langue française, despite the informal context. As my results show a set of alternative overlapping agreement systems, I propose that this heterogeneity is one of the characteristic features of inclusive French.

The weight of the voice: gender, privilege, and qualic apperception

For transmasculine individuals who undergo testosterone therapy, a lower pitch is often one of the most desired results, both for personal affirmation as well as for how a low pitch is gendered by others. This paper explores how members from a peer support group for transmasculine individuals articulate their experiences taking testosterone. During interviews participants discussed their apperception of the acoustic changes in their voices (Zimman 2012, 2018) as well as the recognition of this change by others. In this paper, I explore how their apperceptions of their voices are organized around a cluster of related qualia of the voice (Harkness 2014, 2017) such as “heaviness”, “deepness”, “resonance”, and social “weightiness”. As their voices lower in pitch over time and they are more frequently gendered as men in social spaces, they navigate shifting positionalities of privilege, and I show how their descriptions of their voices naturalize various qualia of the voice, linking “deepness” to the social “weight”, or power, of a voice.

A philosophy, a methodology, and a gender identity

Mixed methods research (MMR) based in a pragmatic research philosophy involves the integration of qualitative and quantitative methods to triangulate research findings and strengthen interpretations. This especially holds for complex research questions and/or data. Non-binary focused sociolinguistic research often deals with multiple complexities, including dynamic and contextually dependent ways of identifying and variation in body modification affecting speech production. While echoing prior calls for researchers to apply, when appropriate, a pragmatic/MMR framework (Angouri 2010), I uniquely argue that it can empower non-binary researchers and research collaborators, ultimately generating positive social change. My objective in presenting non-binary focused sociophonetic research is to demonstrate the framework’s advantages. These include foregrounding non-binary voices and experiences to generate rich, nuanced research questions, data, and analyses. These elements, as well as demonstrable ecological validity and multiple (collaborative and/or cross-discipline) perspectives are the hallmarks of transformative research which focuses on fostering social change.

Queering the French Académie

Trans and non-binary communities have long known the importance of linguistic practices and the power that determining the meaning of words and which words fit has over one’s feelings of validation, visibility, acceptance and existence. In the French-speaking context, and in France, especially, trans and non-binary people not only have to construct their identities within a strongly binary language but also face the gatekeeping and constraining power of the French Académie. This article examines the linguistic practices of trans users on two online forums and highlights three main strategies used by French-speaking trans and non-binary individuals: (1) the non-normative use of binary grammatical gender to index non-binary identities, (2) the reframing of body parts as either non-indexical of sex/gender or as indexing only one’s self-identified sex/gender, and (3) the use of English terminology.

Both, and: Transmedicalism and resistance in non-binary narratives of gender-affirming care

While gender dysphoria is a real and acute distress for many transgender people, it is not universal, and it is experienced and oriented to in a myriad of ways. However, its status as a prerequisite for gender-affirming care can lead trans people to feel compelled to amplify its salience in their pursuits for medical support. Through a critical discourse analysis of non-binary healthcare narratives, I trace the relationship between linguistic practices in these care interactions and the gender and sexual logics of the transmedicalist model of transgender care. With a focus on excerpts that center on individuals’ descriptions of dysphoria in the consultation room, I contend that these experiences are not straightforward accounts of assimilation to transmedicalist expectations. Rather, when read from a trans linguistic perspective, these strategies are examples of non-binary patients enacting their own interventions on a process over which (it may seem) they have minimal control and present a critical thirding (Tuck 2009) of a dichotomous view of either transnormativity or resistance.

Variation in subject doubling in Homeland and Heritage Faetar

This paper investigates subject doubling in Faetar, an endangered and understudied variety of Francoprovençal. Comparing Homeland speakers (i.e., speakers who were born and raised in Faeto) and Heritage speakers of the language (i.e., speakers who emigrated to Toronto, Canada after age 18, and their children), we find some striking differences. Our results show that subject doubling is grammatically constrained in the source variety: Homeland speakers favor doubling in new information contexts, while Heritage speakers do not. There is also evidence for a change in progress among Homeland speakers, with younger speakers using more subject doubling than older speakers. This change is not mirrored by the Heritage speakers. We propose that this is because the Heritage speakers left the Homeland either before or around the time that the youngest Homeland speakers in our sample were born, resulting in them having missed out on this change. This highlights that both Homeland and Heritage varieties are dynamic and may develop in different directions. Additionally, this study helps complete the picture previously reported for variation between overt (single or doubled) and null subjects in these two varieties: an ongoing decrease in null subject rates in the Homeland variety and stability in the Heritage variety (Nagy et al. 2018).

A sociophonetic analysis of Farsi vowel systems among heritage speakers and immigrants of Persian ethnicity in Oklahoma

This study investigates the variation of the Farsi vowel formants – F1 and F2 – among Persian-American heritage and immigrant speakers in Oklahoma, a topic which has been under-investigated. The participants were a group of 20 Persian adult immigrants (ten males and ten females) and 20 US-born Persian-American heritage speakers of Farsi (ten males and ten females). Data were gathered in the form of acoustic audio recordings of a 150-word word list carefully pronounced by the participants. A lexicon was created for the purpose of forced alignment, and vowel formants were extracted using DARLA. The vowel plots showed substantial similarity among all participants to the Farsi monolingual speakers’ in Iran regarding the back vowels /u/, /o/ and /ɒ/. However, the front /i/ and /e/ sounds were a bit more back than that of the monolinguals. In regard to /æ/, both groups of female Persian immigrants and female Persian heritage speakers showed similarity to that of the monolinguals; however, male Persian immigrants and male Persian heritage speakers had a relatively raised /æ/.

Second-generation Persians’ Participation in the Oklahoma Dialect

Vowel systems are a rich source of information about speakers’ social affiliations and linguistic influences. With the purpose of contributing to recent dialect investigations of immigrant communities inside the US, this study examined the acoustics of bilingual Persian-Oklahomans and their participation in Oklahoma dialect features. Twenty Oklahoma-born second-generation Persian-Americans were compared to ten monolingual European-Oklahomans with respect to their production of local dialect features. Results showed similar vowel spaces between the groups indicating that second-generation Persian-Oklahomans participated in the local mix of Southern and Midland features, with one notable exception: they did not display the pin/pen merger, a feature of Southern dialects. Similar studies on European-Oklahoman speakers suggested a uniform presence of pin/pen merger among Research on the Dialects of English in Oklahoma (RODEO) project respondents. However, Persian-Oklahomans’ productions of these vowels were consistently unmerged across the continuum of speech styles. Accordingly, this study argues for a connection between this acoustic variation and speakers’ demographic traits, make-up of social network, and heritage Farsi despite their frequent contact with the merger and their rich social network with middle-class European-Oklahoman speakers of the Oklahoma dialect.