“Why do gay people talk like THAT? Why can’t they just talk normal? Why do they sound so annoying? Why do they have to ‘rub their gayness in my face’?” Wow miss thing, slow down with that shade before I read you diva. It’s giving rude. Serving uneducated. Maybe queer slang bothers you because you don’t understand? Maybe you’re outside of something and that bothers you? What if I said you were outside of the outside? That you are so very inside, that the edges of language and culture disgust you?

Why do gay people talk like that? Because they had to, and in many parts of the world, still do. The most common example of a gay cant (a language used by a group to exclude or confuse outsiders) is Polari. Cants are also called anti-languages, pretty badass if you ask me. The term “lavender language” has been used to describe how different queer communities speak, and there are more examples than you’d expect. How different can these lavender dialects get from the language they are based on? And why does their slang often become popular outside of the queer communities they originated in?

Polari was used by gay men and gay women in England up until the late 1960s, and took influence from circus slang, sailor slang, thieves cant, Romani, rhyming slang, and Italian, and can be seen in words we still use such as naff (dull) and zhoosh (also zhuzh), as in retouching your hair. But why? Because it was illegal to be gay. Polari served as ‘metalinguistic signalling’, essentially language that knew it was language and wanted to communicate something specific to others, in this case, queerness. “Lilly Law” and “Jennifer Justice” were Polari terms commonly used to describe police so their presence could be noted without “Lilly” and “Jennifer” becoming aware. Polari would also reverse words like hair was “riah” causing eyelashes to be “ogle riahs”; literally eye hairs. Mince, camp, and butch also come from Polari, while the Italian influence can be seen in “bona nochy” as good night (from buona notte). Polari became less secret with television and popular music revealing the gay dialect to the mainstream. In the late ‘60s Britian repealed part of its anti-homosexuality laws, making the language less necessary for legal safety, and tragically many of the remaining Polari speakers died in the AIDS crisis of the ‘80s.

Another example of English-language-based lavender language is “Are you a friend of Dorothy?”. They were asking if another person was gay thanks to Judy Garland being a gay icon. In the 80s, the US Naval Intelligence Service (you know, whose speciality is cracking codes) was trying to get those pesky homos out of the Navy. They were convinced there was a woman named Dorothy who was behind it all, a mastermind who connected all the gays. Maybe they should’ve checked the yellow brick road.

In Peru, gay people, trans people and sex workers speak Lóxoro, an argot (the jargon or slang of a particular group) based on Spanish. Loca (crazy woman) becomes lócuti – a closeted gay, mámá becomes mácuti, and SIDA, ‘AIDS’, becomes sícuti or sícutidácuti, while cuti has become a word for friend found nowhere else in the Spanish language. In our typical elaborate style, hola becomes hósorolásara, clearing a very necessary language change there. My personal favourites are the adjectives chipi, comercial, chala, and chala con furia, which describe a man with a small penis, normal penis, big penis, and giant penis. Worth noting is the other commonly used name for this argot, Húngaro, which denotes that this language variety is so difficult for Peruvian Spanish speakers that it may as well be Hungarian.

Southern Africa is a complicated situation. During apartheid South Africa, gay men of colour developed Gayle (also Gail), drawing from SA’s Germanic languages, English and Afrikaans, as well as Polari. In contrast, IsiNgquomo (also IsiGqumo) is a gay argot used in SA and Zimbabwe but is instead based on the Bantu language family. Sadly, incredibly little field work has been undertaken regarding IsiNgquomo. We know IsiNgquomo developed in the ‘80s, but the number of speakers is unknown and the available vocabulary is minimal. An example of the argot that we do know is IsiNgquomo’s “Isiphukwana sake, kuyavuswa na?”, which is quite far from the IsiNdebele (a Bantu language) translation of “Ubolo sake, kuyakhulu na?”. The English translation is “His penis, is it big?”, which may seem a bit obscene but actually makes a lot of sense. As the point of these argots is to hide the discussion of queer activity, it’s logical to start with coded ways to discuss gay sex as non-taboo subjects can be discussed in the standard dialect e.g. IsiNdebele.

Gayle is considerably more like Polari however with its own twist, such as Betty Bangles or Priscilla for police, with the bangles assumingly being a play on handcuffs. Gayle has 20,000 speakers, that’s only 7,000 less than the population of Taupō, and more than the populations of Te Awamutu or Tokoroa. Gayle is particularly cryptic as hearing a speaker would likely sound like they are listing female friends, such as Adele meaning a vindictive or dangerous gay person, Agatha meaning a gossip, Amanda meaning amazing, Angela meaning kind or helpful, Cilla being a cigarette, Deborah; depressed, Erica; erection, Jella; hurry up, Julia; jewellery, Lettie; lesbian, Lizzy; lazy, Lucy; sexually active, Lulu; laugh, Mavis; very effeminate man, Mince; walk, Nancy; no, and Poppy; poppers. So “Nancy, Jella, you Lizzy, Deborah Mavis” translates to “No, hurry up, you lazy, depressed femme”. If you have a female name, check the Gayle Wikipedia page, there’s a good chance it means something. Gayle translates “Getting drunk at a party” to “Getting Dora at a patsy”, which I’m definitely going to start using.

In the ‘70s, Swardspeak (also, Gay Lingo, Bekimon, Bekinese, and Bekispuk) evolved in the Philippines from a mix of Tagalog, English, Spanish, and some Japanese, and like the others, is an argot used to identify other queer people. Despite this, in industries such as fashion, beauty, and entertainment, many straight women and even some straight men can be heard speaking Swardspeak. Even for gay slang, I’ve never heard a language with so many celebrity references. A cheap outfit is often called Mariah Carey as it sounds like the Tagalog word “mura”, meaning cheap. Rain is “Julanis Morissette”, from Tagalog “ulan” for rain and the lyrics “It’s like rain on your wedding day!” from her song “Ironic”. Speakers describe the language as exchanging inside jokes or even verbal jazz, where speakers improvise off of each other to constantly keep the language evolving.

There are a few trends reasonably consistent across lavender languages, such as she-ing and an unconventional use of pronouns. She-ing is the use of feminine language for non-feminine subjects, such as gurl, sis, or kween, being used between gay men. Polari, Gayle, and Swardspeak also exhibit she-ing, especially Gayle’s lexicon. When queer people describe something non-feminine as “she” it’s a very different intention than a dad calling his boat “she”, such as “the weather is tea, she’s sunny”. This has more powerful implications than just playing with language, such as inverting cultural hierarchies that place heterosexual masculinity at the top and femininity and queerness at the bottom. Instead, in the words of lavender linguist Paul Baker, she-ing is “inverting society’s mainstream societal values so that everybody is potentially gay and everybody is potentially feminine.”. This leads into pronouns. Another field of innovation, with the repopularising of the singular they, and the introduction of neo-pronouns.

Gayle started in the ’50s drag scene of the Cape Coloured community before spreading to mainstream white queer culture in the ‘60s. Similar to how Polari was popularised through TV and music, modern gay and ballroom slang has permeated beyond their original communities through social media and shows such as Ru Paul’s Drag Race. Boots the house down, yas, slay, serve, diva, shade, beat, werk, snatched, and gagged are by no means queer exclusive at this point, and many haven’t been for years. But if these words and dialects grow from a necessity to point our gaydars in the right direction, often in covert ways, why would non-queer people want to use them? If the point isn’t in-group identity signalling, as it isn’t in the case of the cishet (another slang term) use of these terms, then what is it?

This is where I contacted Julie Barbour, a Senior Lecturer of Linguistics here at UoW, and honestly, the only reason I grew my obsessive interest in linguistics that resulted in this feature. If you get a chance to take COMMS101 or any of her higher-level papers, do. No subject will make you question how you understand a lecturer, while they are explaining how humans process speech, as reality shatteringly as linguistics can.

In response to my asking, Why do popular slang words tend to come from marginalized groups? Such as straight people borrowing queer slang or queer slang tending to come from drag queens of colour. Julie offered this response:

“Slang is an innovative language feature that emerges in small groups of people in society. There is something inherently ‘cool’ about its use: it is new, edgy, often used by youth, and those people in society who hold the greatest social power and authority generally have no idea what slang means. It can serve as a form of resistance and rebellion, and the use of slang can be a very strong marker of in-group identity.”

The rapid adoption of slang outside of the original in-crowd speaks to the social status of its users. When a group of people, and their language, are identified as ‘cool’, their rebellion and resistance as ‘worthy’, and their behaviours as exciting and attention-grabbing, those people are imitated. From a linguistic point of view, this is a natural process. Language users innovate, those innovations are adopted and spread gradually through different social groups and, through different social contexts, and if the innovation is successful enough, it is normalised and learned as a basic component of the language by new generations of speakers.
But of course, as soon as slang spreads beyond the original users, it loses its novelty value, and eventually, when it enters the mainstream, it may simply become informal language, losing its social power as a marker of identity that references youth/rebellion/resistance/minority identities etc. Slang is a bit like the linguistic equivalent of fashion. When only one or two retailers sell an item, and when you have to pre-order to be sure of getting one, fashionable items have real social currency. But when you can pick an up in clearance sales at Farmers or the Warehouse, it is no longer ‘cool’.

I found Julie’s point that “if the innovation is successful enough, it is normalised and learned as a basic component of the language by new generations of speakers.”, as particularly powerful. If we really simplify this point out of an intergenerational context, we can understand how queer slang could spread without later speakers even realising they are using lavender language. Let’s say the Aotearoa drag queen Electra Schock (yes, from RPDR Down Under), tells her non-queer friend ‘Sarah’ the meaning of a reasonably avant-garde gay slang word, “gagged”, and then Sarah tells Latu, Latu may have no idea the word is even from gay culture unless Sarah makes a point of mentioning so. I suspect this may be happening in Gen Alpha’s use of incredibly saturated queer slang like king, kween, slay, werk, and yas. As they’ve grown up with this language around them, particularly online, its origins are likely unclear and seemingly irrelevant. In contrast, you know us at Nexus use that Berlin, NYC, designer slang that will take years until you can afford the shipping to NZ.

As the primary purpose of queer slang will always remain relevant within our community (to easily identify each other, ideally without non-queer people noticing), even when our slang is popularised by the mainstream, we simply must create new linguistic identity markers. So keep saying ‘yaaaas, because well always be one ‘a’ ahead of you.

I focused on lavender languages of the past, and those that are well recorded, because writing of contemporary queer slang is like chasing rainbows. There are plenty of queer cants and argots I haven’t had the word count to mention, and the effect of social media on queer slang is undeniably profound, but even from what I have covered, you can clock that us gays will never let language get naff.