Abstract
Not long after the premiere of Loxoro in 2011, a short-film by Claudia Llosa which presents the problems the transgender community faces in the capital of Peru, a new language variety became visible for the first time to the Lima society. Lóxoro [‘lok.so.ɾo] or Húngaro [‘uŋ.ga.ɾo], as its speakers call it, is a language spoken by transsexuals and the gay community of Peru. The first clues about its existence were given by a comedian, Fernando Armas, in the mid 90’s, however it is said to have appeared not before the 60’s. Following some previous work on gay languages by Baker (2002) and languages and society (cf. Halliday 1978), the main aim of the present article is to provide a primary sketch of this language in its phonological, morphological, lexical and sociological aspects, based on a small corpus extracted from the film of Llosa and natural dialogues from Peruvian TV-journals, in order to classify this variety within modern sociolinguistic models (cf. Muysken 2010) and argue for the “anti-language” (cf. Halliday 1978) nature of it.
Highlights
As we will notice (§3), this is a cryptolalic Spanish phrase. Many people associated this slang with queer language; nothing more was said until the release of Claudia Llosa’s Teddy Award winning short film, Lóxoro, in 2011, which depicted the life of the transsexual community in Lima
From the discussion, it can be seen that Lóxoro, in the same fashion as Polari, is an anti-language (Halliday 1978) in a broad sense, and a genderlect
This language variety has undergone some changes in its cryptolalisation processes and is still spoken nowadays in Peru
Summary
The more interesting fact about Lóxoro is the cryptolalisation process so as to make the language unrecognisable and secret. It can either be added to a common Peruvian Spanish word or to an already cryptolalised Lóxoro word It remains to be found, other types of suffixes in the language which may convey different meanings for cryptolalisation means. Speakers of Lóxoro varieties are stigmatised not because of linguistic differences, but because of their conditions as members of a gender community not accepted by Peruvian society (cf Cameron 1995 for other similar examples of covert discrimination). I present the same chart adding genderlects in order to see which characteristics this language shares with other existing language varieties among societies: Something similar can be seen in the Amixer community of Peru (Bráñez 2012).
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