Colloquium - Trans people and language variation: Social and structural insights from sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics has long been interested in how gender and language interact, at both the level of the individual as well as that of the speech community and society more broadly. The field of queer linguistics aims to deconstruct the assumed naturalness of male-female differences in language use, and the relatively recent turn towards language in trans communities opens up exciting new opportunities to further interrogate these associations.  This talk will draw on work carried out with queer and trans communities in Ottawa, Canada and Auckland, New Zealand, looking at variation across several dimensions of language use, each of which gives us insight into the performativity of gender and sexuality.  Sociophonetic variation above and below the level of conscious awareness tells us about the micro-cues we use to present and interpret gender. Metalinguistic reflection on stereotyped expectations of gendered performance highlights the tensions that exist between the individual and their communities. Lexical variation in identity terms and self-chosen labels reveals social schema of both normative and non-normative identities, and the agency of individuals in orienting to those social categories.  The integration of trans people into linguistic study not only offers a unique perspective on the constitutive relationship between language and social identities, but can also provide unexpected insights into the structural linguistic systems that operate within and across speech communities.