Outline of the chapter

This chapter presents age as one of the principal factors of sociolinguistic variation. Life stages from early socialization to adolescence, adulthood and old age are reviewed, as are theoretical and methodological issues of relating linguistic performance to speaker age and discovering age-specific language patterns. The sociolinguistic significance of age is then discussed in regards to the demographic imbalance of declining languages and language attitudes separating the younger and older age cohorts.

Key terms: age, age grading, age specific language use, ageing, intergenerational communication

Time depth

People come and go; words come and go; and languages come and go. How are these processes connected? Connected they are, for how could words be coined, passed on and discarded if there were no speakers to do the coining, passing on and the discarding? Language is a tradition; otherwise we would not understand one another. It must be handed down from one generation to the next in a way that allows members of coexisting generations to communicate. But it is not handed down unaltered. For each generation recreates the language of its predecessors. Cases of language demise – the discontinuation of a tradition – provide compelling evidence of the intergenerational gap.