- Is it possible to sound gay?

We know many of the factors that shape our identities from race to geography to disability can impact the way we use language.

So what about gender and sexuality?

Lavender language refers to the speech practices of LGBTQ+ people and the linguists who study it have chronicled a rich global history that has thrived in secrecy for decades.

I'm Dr. Erica Brozovsky and this is "Other Words."

(bright quirky music) - [Announcer] "Other Words."

- In the 1990s, anthropologist William Leap wanted to study the way people of different LGBTQ+ identities speak and chose lavender, a slang synonym for gay or queer, as an umbrella term.

Leap wasn't the first to study lavender language.

The term he used came from a dictionary of gay slang written in the 1940s.

But his work defined a field of study that covers everything from how people use pronouns to the wordplay of gossip and insults to queer vernaculars or argots, the complex and sometimes secret vocabularies of LGBTQ+ communities.

One of the most famous and well-documented gay argots is Polari, which was used by gay men in England until the late 1960s.

It borrowed from all kinds of speaking groups on the fringes of society like thieves, sailors, theater performers, and Romani people.

Polari speakers would rhyme or reverse words or borrow from other languages to create new slang.

Some Polari words that we still use are naff, meaning tacky or unfashionable, or zhuzh, the verb for sprucing up your hair or outfit that's fun to say, but impossible to spell.

In the late '60s, Polari started to show up in popular music and television shows, sort of like how contemporary queer and trans ballroom slang has gotten popularized through shows like "Drag Race."

At the same time, Britain repealed part of its anti-homosexuality laws, making the secret code less necessary for safety.

Polari started to fall out of regular use in the gay community, suffering a significant blow when many of the remaining Polaris speakers died in the AIDS crisis of the 1980s.

Still, lavender linguists continued to study and document Polari to preserve this important part of LGBTQ+ history.

But for much of its history, Polari was somewhat of a secret code.

When homosexuality was criminalized in the UK, slipping Polari phrases into everyday speech could help you identify who else around you was also gay without being obvious to straight people.

Polari also had slang names for police like Lily Law or Jennifer Justice, so that gay men could warn each other that police were around without them noticing.

Some features of Polari also live on in other lavender languages around the globe.

Loxoro, an argot based on Spanish spoken by trans people and sex workers in Peru, has a similar coded nature, reversing words and adding extra syllables like dosoro and cuti.

Hola becomes hosorolasara.

And Mama becomes Macuti.

This feature called cryptolalisation allows Loxoro speakers to discuss taboo topics around listeners they may not know or trust.

Gayle, an argot that arose in apartheid South Africa among gay men of color, also borrows from Polari and mixes it with English and Afrikaans.

Gayle's main feature is using alliteration to substitute women's names for other common words.

Just like Polari referred to police as Jennifer Justice, Gayle speakers might talk about avoiding Betty Bangles or getting Dora at a patsy instead of drinking at a party.

Gayle, like Polari, employs a common feature of lavender languages.

She-ing, or using feminine language for non feminine subjects.

Just like how gay men in the US might refer to friends as girl, sister, or queen.

Lavender languages have a long tradition of playfulness with gender to challenge our ideas about language and power.

Using feminine language reverses the cultural hierarchies that put masculine people at the top of the social order and feminine, queer, and trans people at the bottom.

According to lavender linguist Paul Baker, she-ing is, "Inverting mainstream society's values so that everybody's potentially gay and everybody's potentially feminine."

That's also how speakers of Swardspeak, also called simply gay lingo in the Philippines, describe their use of language.

The mix of Tagalog, Spanish, English and some Japanese that began in the 1970s is known as a mode of social resistance for the way that it allows speakers to play with gendered language rules of the languages they speak.

Like the other argots we discussed, Swardspeak is used to immediately identify other speakers as queer, and it can also be pretty useful for gossiping or talking behind people's backs in a way that not everybody can understand.

But speakers say it's no longer as secret as it used to be.

In fact, in circles that contain a lot of LGBTQ+ people, like the fashion, beauty, and entertainment industries, Swardspeak has spread to women and even some straight men.

Swardspeak is not just a multilingual mashup.

It's also filled with celebrity references.

You might call an inexpensive outfit Mariah Carey, because Mariah sounds like mura, the Tagalog word for cheap.

And Julanis Morissette means to rain from the Tagalog word for rain, ulan, and the iconic line from the song "Ironic."

Using Swardspeak requires a lot of complex cultural knowledge.

There are borrowed words from half a dozen languages and deep pop culture cuts that can take speakers years of engaging with the gay community to be able to fully understand.

This helps solidify the in-group identities of speakers through the act of creating language together.

Some Swardspeak users say that gay lingo is like verbal jazz where speakers are constantly riffing and innovating off of each other to keep this lavender language evolving.

These are by no means the only lavender languages that exist.

As the field grows, researchers from all over the world gather each year to talk about new developments in LGBTQ+ language use and there's so much more to learn.

Many of the examples we discussed today are lavender languages used by cisgender gay men because they're some of the most researched argots.

Still, trans and gender nonconforming people are also innovating language practices like repopularizing the use of the singular they, or introducing themselves with pronouns when meeting new people.

While there's so much more to study, lavender linguistics reminds us that celebrating our own identities is a doorway into a freer and more expansive expression of ourselves and that there is no more direct means of expression