Would you consider gay slang a sociolect?

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I've been thinking about the topic lately, so I thought I'd post about it here. A sociolect is a form of speech that indicates a person's social class or standing. It can apply to socioeconomic backgrounds, certain ethnicities and/or cultural groups (sometimes referred to as an ethnolect), age groups, etc.

Now, this brings up the question of whether certain slang that is popular in the LGBT+ community would fall under the sociolect category or not. Here is a video that illustrates some terms, jokes, plus references that are associated within the community, it's highly stereotypical as it's meant to be very exaggerated and humorous.



It can be difficult to determine these things because language changes so much, and terms that are originally confined to one group tend to become more widespread overtime. For instance, the word naff was originally from the anti-language of Polari.

Back when male homosexuality was criminalised in the UK, gay men came up with their own code in order to communicate with one another. This way they could talk in public about taboo subjects, whilst still maintaining appearances and avoiding public suspicion.

To give you a feel on what this code was like, here’s a conversation in Polari and a song:





We like to think of individual cultures as separate to one another, when in actual fact different cultures often influence others. For instance, I saw a post someone I knew made, that was heavy in British slang. I had little clue on what it meant, so I decided to look it up, and to my surprise a dictionary on a Jamaican subdialect was one of the first results to appear.

So, I researched it and it turns out that certain British slang terms and dialects have heavy roots in Jamaican. That’s not too surprising I suppose, when you consider the fact that English itself is mainly just a mix of a bunch of different languages.

I think what stands out about Todrick Hall’s video to me, is that some of the terms in that video are indeed used outside of the community, albeit to a lesser degree.

Some are subtler “No tea” refers to “Spilling the tea”, which is slang that tends to be used in the gay community, when someone “spills the tea” so to speak, they gossip, possibly insult, and provide juicy details about someone, whereas “No tea” means that they are making a point that they are not speaking ill of someone, it’s a sort of “I don’t mean to gossip, but…”

“No shade” means “I’m not insulting you or them (depending on who it is aimed at)”, whereas the action of “throwing shade” is to insult someone (usually in an off-hand and sassy manner).

Both terms aren’t directly tied to being LGBT, so sometimes they are used outside of the community, but they are still used more often within it.

However, other terms such as “clocking” (outing someone as trans) “being clocked from the inside” (being outed as trans by someone who is also trans), “dating a beard” (usually a gay man, but can also apply to lesbians, where someone who is only interested in the same sex dates someone of the opposite sex in order to appear as straight) and “coming out of the closet” tend to only appear within the community. However, I have heard of people coming out as things that aren’t LGBT related, such as someone coming out as an atheist to their religious family, etc.

Interestingly, “passing” is a term that tends to come up in the community, but it also appears in other communities such as the autistic (as well as other neurodiverse conditions) community, albeit for different reasons.

So, in the gay community, “passing” refers to being seen as straight, someone might attempt to pass as straight by purposefully acting in a stereotypically heterosexual manner, perhaps even overdoing it (constantly pretending to show interest in the opposite sex, to the point where it’s suspicious).

Whereas in ND communities, “passing” tends to refer to being seen as NT.

Anyway, what are your thoughts? Would you consider it a sociolect?

It's sort of similar to "rhyming slang," in a way.

"Rhyming slang" was created so people of Cockney origin (seen as "low class" by the "upper classes) could make fun of the "upper classes" without the "upper classes" knowing what's going on.

Calypso has similar origins----from Caribbean ex-slaves who wanted to satirize "upper class" British society in the Caribbean without being "caught" satirizing them.

Calypso originated from Trinidad and Tobago, and so did steel drums.

I think it very much fits. I don't know if it would be as prominent without drag shows though. It's hard to imagine what the community would talk like without the influence of drag shows since they're a perfect vehicle for the creation and distribution of slang.