Age Grading in Sociolinguistic Theory

Abstract

Distinguishing linguistic change at the community level (‘generational change’) from linguistic change at the individual level (‘age grading’) is “one of the major issues in contemporary sociolinguistics” (Tagliamonte 2012:247). This article gives a brief history of the study of language change in the community, before turning to the types of linguistic behavior that have been observed across individuals’ lifespans. The article also discusses the meanings that have been attributed to the term ‘age grading’, arguing that consensus cannot be reached without more longitudinal work to determine the limits of lifespan linguistic change.

The beauty in a beast: Minimising the effects of diverse recording quality on vowel formant measurements in sociophonetic real-time studies

“…F1 of young speakers' /u/ was 0.5 units closer to /a/ in comparison to the middle-aged (t(21.5) = 2.2, p = 0.035) and to old speakers (t(19.2) = 2.4, p = 0.028), while the latter two age groups did not differ significantly from each other. These age group results are difficult to reconcile with the idea of age grading which would rather predict middle-aged speakers to deviate significantly from the remaining speaker groups (Wagner 2012). We will return to this discussion in 5.5 below.…”

“…Trend studies with real-time data (recorded with different samples of individuals from the same community at different points in time) are unanimously recognised as a particularly insightful and reliable methodological setting for studying language change at a community level (e.g. Labov 1994;Sankoff and Blondeau 2007;Trudgill 1988), primarily because they eliminate effects related to speaker age, such as age grading (Wagner 2012). However, real-time studies frequently rely on acoustic analyses of recordings of speech made using different equipment with variable technical specifications and following different recording procedures.…”

Indian English Evolution and Focusing Visible Through Power Laws

“…Apparent time analyses draw on the assumption that a speaker's grammar is relatively stable post-adolescence, reflecting the communicative norms from when they were age~20, such that younger speakers use newer, emerging forms, while older speakers demonstrate older, conservative forms. Such data is less reliable evidence of diachronic change because language patterns can also change across the lifespan such that older speakers also adopt innovations [61]. However, such changes tend to emerge in forms which gain social meaning, while no lifespan-based changes in quantitative frequency patterns have been documented [61].…”

“…Such data is less reliable evidence of diachronic change because language patterns can also change across the lifespan such that older speakers also adopt innovations [61]. However, such changes tend to emerge in forms which gain social meaning, while no lifespan-based changes in quantitative frequency patterns have been documented [61]. In gender-based apparent time comparisons, women are typically found to lead linguistic change: gender-based differences can thus provide insight into directions of change within data from the same generation [62].…”

Stylistic variation over 200 years of court proceedings according to gender and social class

“…Recently, also the possible interplay between social variables is considered (Prabhakaran and Rambow, 2017), but is mostly confined to age and gender (see e.g. Ardehaly and Culotta (2015); Argamon et al (2007); Barbieri (2008); Burger et al (2011);Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (2013); Holmes and Meyerhoff (2003); Hovy and Søgaard (2015); Nguyen et al (2014);Peersman et al (2011);Schwartz et al (2013);Wagner (2012)) as other social variables -such as social class -are not easily available (cf. Sloan et al (2015)).…”