Beyond binary gender: creaky voice, gender, and the variationist enterprise

Abstract

This paper promotes a sophisticated treatment of gender in variationism through a large-scale quantitative analysis of creak, a nonmodal voice quality stereotypically associated with women in US English. An analysis of our gender-diverse corpus, including cisgender, transgender, and nonbinary individuals, finds that gender does not predict variation; all gender groups produce high rates of creak. However, gender does interact with style: all speakers use more creak in interview speech compared with read speech, but some groups style-shift more than others, suggesting that gender remains a relevant factor in capturing how creak is deployed as a resource in social practice. We use this analysis to advocate for a move beyond the gender binary in quantitative descriptions of sociolinguistic variables and call for the greater inclusion of trans+ individuals in sociolinguistics.