Polari - The Lost Language of Gay Men

Front Cover
Routledge, Sep 2, 2003 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 224 pages
Polari is a secret form of language mainly used by homosexual men in London and other cities during the twentieth century. Derived in part from the slang lexicons of numerous stigmatised and itinerant groups, Polari was also a means of socialising, acting out camp performances and reconstructing a shared gay identity and worldview among its speakers. This book examines the ways in which Polari was used in order to construct 'gay identities', linking its evolution to the changing status of gay men and lesbians in the UK over the past fifty years.
 

Contents

Section 1
Section 2
Section 3
Section 4
Section 5
Section 6
Section 7
Section 8
Section 15
Section 16
Section 17
Section 18
Section 19
Section 20
Section 21
Section 22

Section 9
Section 10
Section 11
Section 12
Section 13
Section 14
Section 23
Section 24
Section 25
Section 26
Section 27

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About the author (2003)

Paul Baker is a research associate at the Department of Linguistics, Lancaster University. His research interests include endangered and minority languages, language and sexualities and corpus based approached to language engineering. He has published papers in the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, Literary and Linguistics Computing and Computer Assisted Language Learning. He is a committee member of the Foundation for Endangered Languages.