Volume 2009, Issue 200

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.

This article examines age and identity in the context of language shift occurring in a community on the Isle of Skye, Scotland. Via a language ability test and a language usage survey, 19 speakers were assessed; it was determined that the older (40+) and the younger speakers (<40) in this community are distinguishable on the basis of language ability, particularly in terms of synthetic forms, conditional forms, and post-nominal possession. The usage survey revealed a decline in older speakers' longitudinal use of Gaelic, and although younger speakers are making an effort to speak Gaelic and are not accommodated by older speakers switching to English, we can still conclude that, to some degree, older speakers are somewhat linguistically isolated in this community. Finally, we propose identity negotiation and the possibility of the age and identity correlation as perpetuating factors in the language shift.

The language of the aged has not been given as much attention as that of the youth. Hence, the aim of this research is to compare the language choices and discoursal features of the aged with that of the youth. This study focuses on the Chinese community from Tangkak, Johor, in Peninsular Malaysia, who use the Hokkien dialect. The older informants preferred to speak in their dialect while the younger informants preferred Mandarin. Older informants seldom code-switched but when they did, the codes in their mixed discourse were Hokkien and Mandarin, while that of the younger informants were Mandarin, Malay, and/or English. On the basis of an analysis of the audio recordings, observations, field notes, and informal interviews, the features are identified in the discourse of the aged, i.e., off-target verbosity (OTV), painful self-disclosure (PSD), and self-handicapping talk. The study shows that the discoursal features of the aged are clearly different from that of the youth.

There have been countless speculations about the phenomenon of languages changing in time from generation to generation. As the age difference between generations increases, changes in the language passed down from the older generation to the younger become much more noticeable. Over time, Cypriot Turkish (i.e., the variety of Turkish used by the Turkish Cypriot community in Northern Cyprus) has been exposed to a variety of internal and external changes through contact with Standard Turkish. The main purpose of this article is to explore the intergenerational phonological shift over apparent time in the city of Famagusta in Northern Cyprus. The focus is on the competition between the traditional non-standard Turkish Cypriot voiced obstruent stop variants [g], [d], and [b] and the Standard Turkish voiceless variants [k], [t], and [p]. The results show sociolinguistic variation depending on age and gender, and point to the possibility of a long-term decline in Cypriot Turkish in favor of Standard Turkish.

Emigration usually requires speakers to become bilingual, and eventually they may even become dominant in their second language. This can lead to a gradual loss of proficiency in the first language, a phenomenon referred to as first language attrition . As migrants become elderly, however, they sometimes report a “reversion” in language dominance, whereby the second language, which they have used in their daily lives for years or decades, recedes and the first language becomes stronger again. There are largely anecdotal cases of communication between such speakers and their children who were not brought up to speak their parents' first language becoming impossible. It is, however, very difficult to separate fact from fiction in such reports. This article will give an overview of changes in lexical access and fluency in the first language of adult migrants. It will assess simplistic predictions for a linear development of first and second languages against a more complex perspective which takes into account psycholinguistic aspects of activation, inhibition, and cognitive ageing. The predictions made on this basis will be tested on a large-scale quantitative investigation of language proficiency among migrants of German and Dutch descent in the Netherlands and Canada.

This article demonstrates how humor can be used as a resource for managing and minimizing unavoidable conflicts in caretaking of the elderly. Focusing on one particular caregiving task, the diaper change, the article shows how conflict arises in these situations due to the emotional and physical stress that both caregiver and care recipient are under. While these situations and their ensuing conflicts are unavoidable due to the institutional constraints of caregiving, the article attests that when caregiver and care recipient engage in humorous talk before initiating the diaper change, they pay more attention to each other's needs and wishes during the diaper change and thus manage to minimize the conflict that is bound to occur.

As with other socially categorized groups of people, the elderly do not escape being stereotyped by the more dominant groups in society. Old age is often perceived as a less significant stage of life after the peak of adulthood, one that represents decline from full physical, social, and linguistic competence. A question that presents itself is whether such stereotypical perceptions of the elderly are consistent with their actual lives and linguistic behavior. I consider this question by examining naturally occurring, informal peer conversations among the elderly, a type of conversational data that has rarely been studied. I focus on such conversations by elderly Japanese women, comparing the content and the manner of their conversations with commonly held perceptions about elderly women and their verbal behavior, such as the images of being depressed, submissive, and unconcerned about physical attractiveness. The examination reveals that the elderly women in the present study do not display such images; in fact, they can be lively and humorous even when presenting painful experiences, and they exhibit an image of being independent and conscious of their physical appearance. Examinations of verbal presentations by elderly speakers among their peer acquaintances provide an insight into an aspect of their lives that is rarely available to younger people. The observations obtained here, it is hoped, will lead to a better understanding of social situations in which older people are placed and of their patterns of communication, and ultimately to a decrease of misunderstanding in intergenerational communication.

In this article we focus on the communicative relevance of the category of generation, which is often, in sociolinguistic research, restricted to the meaning of age group, connected in a more or less explicit way to an almost conservative attitude on (linguistic) values. We examine the generational references in the life narratives of elderly French men and women in order to ascertain the personal meaning as it takes place in discourse. This analysis is based on statements made about May '68 in France. The events of May '68, as well as their historical and current importance, have been described as promulgating the concept of generation: May '68 can be considered a generational keyword. The statements in the narratives discussed in this article reveal a variety of standpoints and references made in old age, statements that challenge the idea of a homogeneous age group in terms of historical evaluation and memory. On the basis of four case studies of interviews with elderly people, we trace the sequential structure of a personal generational identity created when talking about May '68. In the individual points of view expressed therein, we find four dimensions of the concept of generation: (i) in the opposition of values; (ii) in the opposition of old and young; (iii) in the opposition of the generations in a family and their ideological implications; and (iv) as a generation of ideas and possibilities, pertaining — as the member of such a generation — to the past.

As part of a larger research project on images of older people (the over sixties) in UK advertising, this article reports findings from a focus group study in which participants discussed their views on seven TV advertisements depicting older people as central characters. These were selected from a sample of TV ads broadcast in the United Kingdom between 1999 and 2004, and included a range of positive, humorous, negative, and vulnerable depictions. A total of nine focus groups each comprised of three subgroups: young, middle-aged, and older adults. In addition to the ads themselves, our analysis centers on the participants' reactions to the ads. Our focus is on the discursive positioning of the discussants vis-à-vis the ads in terms of age stereotypes and age identity constructions for self and other. Participants not only comment on any perceived depictions of older age, they also position themselves, and others, age-wise, in relation to the depictions, and at times use their age identifications as discursive means to account for their views. The focus on how viewers align with these types of ads can be seen as an important addition to previous research on images of aging in advertising, as well as on talk about age. In our analysis, we make use of the theoretical notions of discursive construction of age and positioning theory.

Drawing on tools from ethnomethodological conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis, this article shows how age identities are constructed through talk-in-interaction. The data analyzed come from a Greek television reality show and involve two participants: a 53-year-old woman and a 63-year-old man. Although their chronological age would not strictly classify them as old people, the identity old person actually becomes relevant for them on various occasions. This identity is either invoked by the two participants themselves or by younger participants and is argumentatively exploited as a means to various ends: to construct their own arguments or have arguments with other participants, and in defending themselves or accusing others of certain behaviors. The data analysis shows how speakers can distance themselves from an age category (most often the category old person ) and, on a di¤erent occasion, endorse the same category if this is required by the context of the interaction or helps them evoke specific identity features. Broadly, this article will show that chronological age alone does not determine a speaker's age identity: age identities are collaboratively negotiated or resisted by conversationalists and/or attributed to them in specific contexts during social interaction. Thus, aging is largely a socially established process, a contextualized interactional achievement.