Age and speaker skills in receding languages: how far do community evaluations and linguists' evaluations agree?
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Nancy C. Dorian
Abstract
The assumption that age will show a correlation with proficiency in the verbal performance of receding-language speakers often has a general validity where group profiles are considered, but exceptions on the individual level can be striking. Individual speaker profiles offered by Aikhenvald for a contemporary Tariana-speaking community and by Bloomfield for the Menomini-speaking community of his time are reviewed in this light and compared with several speaker profiles representing a contracting Gaelic-speaking community in Scotland. Community evaluations of speakers' abilities are shown to reflect local conceptions of speaking well and do not always accord with linguists' assessment of speaker skills. Linguists may need to be more cautious when attaching importance to the role of age as a correlate of proficiency.
© 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
Articles in the same Issue
- Preface: commemorating the 200th issue of IJSL
- Introduction: aging and language
- Age and speaker skills in receding languages: how far do community evaluations and linguists' evaluations agree?
- Gaelic on the Isle of Skye: older speakers' identity in a language-shift situation
- Language choice and code switching of the elderly and the youth
- Intergenerational phonological change in the Famagusta dialect of Turkish Cypriots
- First language attrition and reversion among older migrants
- Managing unavoidable conflicts in caretaking of the elderly: humor as a mitigating resource
- Beyond stereotypes of old age: the discourse of elderly Japanese women
- The multifaceted category of “generation”: elderly French men and women talking about May '68
- Positioning age: focus group discussions about older people in TV advertising
- Age categories as an argumentative resource in conflict talk: evidence from a Greek television reality show
- The politics of language and nationalism in modern Central Europe, by Tomasz Kamusella
Articles in the same Issue
- Preface: commemorating the 200th issue of IJSL
- Introduction: aging and language
- Age and speaker skills in receding languages: how far do community evaluations and linguists' evaluations agree?
- Gaelic on the Isle of Skye: older speakers' identity in a language-shift situation
- Language choice and code switching of the elderly and the youth
- Intergenerational phonological change in the Famagusta dialect of Turkish Cypriots
- First language attrition and reversion among older migrants
- Managing unavoidable conflicts in caretaking of the elderly: humor as a mitigating resource
- Beyond stereotypes of old age: the discourse of elderly Japanese women
- The multifaceted category of “generation”: elderly French men and women talking about May '68
- Positioning age: focus group discussions about older people in TV advertising
- Age categories as an argumentative resource in conflict talk: evidence from a Greek television reality show
- The politics of language and nationalism in modern Central Europe, by Tomasz Kamusella
