The coming of age: How do linguists tease apart chronological, biological and social age?

Abstract

Age is one of the key variables in the field of language variation and change (LVC). The vast majority of experimental work generally views a speaker's date of birth—chronological age—as a good reflection of both their social age, for example, which generation they identify with and how strongly and their biological age, that is, the physiological age of their body. This paper aims to provide the reader with tools to tease apart these three ways of conceptualising the variable of age. It reviews qualitative and quantitative methods from fields adjacent to LVC that will enable linguists of different theoretical interests to tap into biological and social aspects of ageing. In doing so, it provides a practical manual for linguists wishing to work from a more multifaceted understanding of one of the key variables in many linguistic subfields.

Ageing well: Social but also biological reasons for age‐grading

“…Does this mean, however, that researchers cannot tease the two apart? What we would like to propose here, and what we have argued for elsewhere (Hejná & Jespersen, 2021), is that while the relationship between the two can be highly complex, it is not impossible to separate (and/or acknowledge) the two in ways that will give us more explanatory power and accurate understanding of language variation and change.…”

“…However, teasing the biological and the social apart is not impossible. Hejná and Jespersen (2021) provide an overview of the methodology that can be used to directly and indirectly establish biological aspects of ageing, with practical tips including expenses associated with different tools. For this reason, in what follows, we focus on the second, much less easily addressed, challenge that sociolinguists face, which results from the fact that social and biological aspects of ageing are not independent: the physicalities of our bodies have implications for our social life, and our social life has an impact on the body's biological ageing process.…”