Age

Question 1

Age and Language (general)

Answer 1

• age influence language choices, could be argued that impact of age on language has become more prevalent in debate in recent years
• rise in technology and associated language use has led linguists and researchers to consider and debate the influential factors of age more than any other possible variable.
• teenagers are often focus
• Gary Ives asked 63 secondary school students in West Yorkshire if people speak differently depending on age. 100% said yes

Question 2

How does age affect language?

Answer 2

• general assumption that as we get older our language becomes more standard
• apparently we swear less and language becomes more posh
• Gary Ives study participants thought this was the case
-are there other factors though? is it just age?
• despite 100% of teenagers saying yes, it can be problematic to consider age to be the most important factor
• Penelope Eckhart (1988): there are different ways of “defining the concept of age”: chronological age (years), biological age (physical maturity), social age (life events, having children, marriage)
• we should assume that “age is a person’s place at a given time in relation to social order: a stage, a condition, a place in history” (Eckhart 1988), we shouldn’t make sweeping statements about individuals within age groups, but rather all of their circumstances
• language of a single 20 year old woman would be different to language of a married 20 year old women
• Jenny Cheshire (1987) argues that “it is becoming recognised…That adult language, as well as child language, develops in response to important life events that affects the social relations and social attitudes of individuals

Question 3

Douglas S Bigham (2012)

Answer 3

one could argue that “important life events” are more likely to occur post 18, an age termed “emerging adulthood”
therefore chronological age may still be an influential factor for younger speakers

Question 4

Anna Brita Stentstrom

Answer 4

in ‘Teenage Talk: From General Characteristics to the use of Pragmatic Markers in a Contrastive Perspective’ discusses features common to teenage talk
• irregular turn taking
• overlaps
• indistinct articulation
• word shortenings
• teasing and name calling
• verbal duelling (trying to outdo)
• slang
• taboo
• language mixing (from other cultures)

these tend to lessen with age, especially teasing and name calling among men

Question 5

Penelope Eckhart 2003: teenage talk

Answer 5

• slang is used to establish a connection to youth culture (and) to set themselves off from the older generations”
• linguistic change is more common is teenagers, they coin more new lexical items
• also claims that “adolescents do not all talk alike…greater than speech differences among the members of any other age group”, may be patterns but they vary (Gary Ives study)

Question 6

Christopher V Odato 2013

Answer 6

research on the use of ‘like’ as a discourse marker. Children as young as 4 using ‘like’.
• stage 1: children use like infrequently and in only a few syntactic positions, mainly at the beginning of a clause
• stage 2: children use like more often and in a greater number of positions. Girls tended to move to this stage by 5 whereas boys when they were 7.
• stage 3: children now us it more frequently in other positions, such as before a prepositional phrase: “long at how yours landed at like right on the target”. Again, girls moved to this stage earlier than boys”