Language and Sexuality: Language and<scp>LGBTQ</scp><b>+</b>Communities | CU Experts

Studies of the language of queer speakers – i.e. speakers whose gender and/or sexual identities fall outside of the normative heterosexual binary – have followed a trajectory largely mirroring evolutions in the greater field of sociolinguistics. While early sociolinguistic research searched for large‐scale linguistic differences patterning according to broad macro‐social demographic differences, the field in recent decades has increasingly implemented ethnographic, context‐sensitive analyses exploring how individuals use language to construct and project a range of locally meaningful identities on the ground. In the same way, studies of speakers with queer identities were initially concerned with discovering linguistic differences between queer and straight speakers, but have increasingly come to emphasize the diversity of queer voices in various contexts and how these voices contribute to the construction of a range of queer identities.

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