5 - Language, gender, sexuality

Summary

Introduction

Dio Chrysostom delivered his first speech to the inhabitants of the city of Tarsus in Asia Minor sometime between 105 and 115 CE (Salmeri 2000 : 78 n. 126). The speech is a curious work, since the orator spends most of his time criticizing the people for habitually ‘snorting’, making an unpleasant sound with their noses that makes the visitor want to block his ears. In order to hammer home his objection to this noise, Dio compares what would happen if the men spoke with female voices:

Well then, supposing certain people should as a community be so afflicted that all the males got female voices and that no male, whether young or old, could say anything man-fashion, would that not seem a grievous experience and harder to bear, I'll warrant, than any pestilence, and as a result would they not send to the sanctuary of the god and try by many gifts to propitiate the divine power? And yet to speak with female voice is to speak with human voice, and nobody would be vexed at hearing a woman speak. (Dio Chrysostom Oration 33. 38, trans. H. Lamar Crosby)

Dio suggests that for men to speak like women would be considered an affliction worse than the plague, and one that would cause an immediate public call for divine intervention. His invocation of the calamity of men's loss of a distinctively male speech pattern underscores the importance of looking at the link between gender and language. Gender intersects with all the aspects of language discussed in this book so far: the language choices made by bilinguals, the utterance of non-standard linguistic variants, even the progression of language change. The study of gendered speech further cuts across divisions of time, place and social structures, and scholars have observed cross-cultural similarities in the ways in which male and female speakers choose to differentiate themselves through language.