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”:
#Is eminem gay reddit tv
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.