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 Changing voices
Language and the elderly
Playground talk and teenspeak
Language and age by Philippa Law Talking like an old person isn't all about age.
We've seen that language doesn't usually change with age, but surely old people talk differently? Don't they only ever talk about being old? Spitting Image's caricature of the Queen Mother had her regularly and irrelevantly exclaiming "I'm 82 you know!" and when elderly callers appear on local radio, it feels like more often than not their age is the main topic of discussion. "I'm 82 you know!"
"100 next week and fit as a fiddle!"
"The garden's a mess but I'm not as young as I used to be..." In their book 'Language, Society and the Elderly', Coupland et al observe that elderliness is often 'in the air' when talking to old people, sometimes as a source of pride ("100 next week and fit as a fiddle!") or as a reason for non-participation ("The garden's a mess but I'm not as young as I used to be...").Younger people tend to encourage age as a topic of conversation, which leads Coupland et al to ask: "Are younger speakers prey to the expectation, which is still ultimately ageist, that their partner's being elderly makes elderliness available as a resource for their conversation?"If this is the case, it seems a risky assumption to make, since it could highlight the potentially embarrassing differences in mobility, activity and sometimes health between them and the old person.In other ways, younger people are likely to 'overaccommodate' in conversations with the elderly. They bend over backwards to agree with them, repeat what they say and avoid topics which highlight differences between them.Most conversation isn't like that: people exchange stories, ask questions, disagree, debate... but if you won't even say "I saw a terrific film at the cinema last night," for fear of reminding the other person that they're no longer mobile enough to go to the cinema themselves, then suddenly there's very little left to talk about at all.Coupland et al say that younger people who try to be sensitive like this end up in a 'maze' of difficulties: "Ultimately, discourse games like these are dangerous and the dissatisfactions of moving outside one's habitual styles and ideologies can lead to mutually dissatisfying interactions."The flow of conversation can be so badly hampered that the elderly person is driven to fill the awkward pauses with an irrelevant comment or a sudden change of subject, thus reinforcing the perception that they're senile and impossible to converse with.Even from the outset, younger people have been shown to assume - whether consciously or not - that the elderly are intellectually inferior. In 1975, researchers found that students used shorter, simpler sentences when explaining a game to old people than to young people.And in 1981, a study found that up to 20% of what carers in institutions said to the elderly was indistinguishable from the baby talk that parents use with very young children!"...those 'young old' people who still lived in their own homes were less tolerant of baby talk." The carers in the study believed that residents who weren't able to care for themselves liked to be spoken to in baby talk, and that to talk to them normally, as equals, would be less effective.This might sound far-fetched, but it's not far from the truth. It was demonstrated a few years later that exaggerating word stress (a feature of baby talk) had a positive effect on elderly people's ability to remember and understand what had been said to them. And in the original study, whilst some of the elderly residents found baby talk demeaning, others said it felt 'nurturing'.Research in the early 1990s revealed that while elderly people in institutions preferred slow, clear, simple speech, those 'young old' people who still lived in their own homes were less tolerant of baby talk. Younger people also find it easier to converse with active, mobile old people, because there's less chance of putting your foot in it.So although some old people have different conversational preferences, and although many younger people talk down to old people, it seems that 'linguistic elderliness' has little to do with age itself, but more to do with associated health, liveliness and mobility.
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