Ling Fridays: Sprenger on individual variation

Beyond Gay /s/: Speaker-Level Variation in a Queer Romanian Community

Anna-Marie Sprenger, Chicago

What does it mean to sound queer in a place where queerness itself is precarious and unevenly legible? This talk examines /s/ production among queer speakers in Iași, Romania, drawing on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork and 12,574 /s/ tokens from 15 speakers. Mixed-effects models show significant linguistic conditioning but no significant effects of gender or locally identified personae; instead, much of the variation occurs between individual speakers. I focus on two transmasculine speakers with strikingly different /s/ realizations: Toby, whose queer life is deeply oriented toward Anglophone media and transnational queer discourse, and Dani, whose queer politics center local activism, repair, and everyday care. I argue that /s/ is better understood here not as a straightforward marker of gender or sexuality, but as part of broader orientations toward queer social worlds. The analysis also shows what sustained ethnography can reveal about sociophonetic variation that demographic categories alone cannot.