No one expects a teenager and a senior citizen to sound the same, but the question of exactly how age influences our language use is more complex than it might at first seem. A fascinating new study probes how specific life events and experiences might have more of an impact on your linguistic choices than your chronological age per se.
The influence of life experience
While age is often included in many studies of contemporary language change, the reasons that aging affects language are often left underexplored.
It’s not the process of biological aging by itself that is likely to cause us to shift our speech patterns, adopt new words, or change our attitudes about languages and dialects. Instead, it’s far more likely that the types of behaviors, experiences and activities we are involved in at different points across our lives trigger these shifts, regardless of the exact age at which we experience them.
For instance, major life changes like shifting from high school, where non-conformity and slang is often valued, to the job market, where more standard language usually reigns, is more influential on the speech features you pick up than the fact that you aged from 17 to 19.
The linguistic force of “Major Life Events”
In this new study, two linguists at the University of Salzburg in Austria – Mason Wirtz and Simon Pickl – were interested in identifying which “Major Life Events” were more impactful on language patterns across the lifespan as well as what types of language changes they were more likely to instigate.
In the U.S., standard American English co-exists with regional dialects like Southern English or a Boston accent. Similarly, in Austria, local dialects like Bavarian are widely used in addition to Austrian Standard German. Also as in the U.S., people in Austria often equate standard language use with intelligence. But at the same time, use of standard language can be perceived as arrogant, while local dialects convey feelings of warmth and community.
Previous studies have found that individuals do not remain stable in their usage of local vs. standard language as they age, and no two people change their linguistic behavior in the same way or at the same time. However, these studies have woefully neglected which factors beyond the correlation with chronological age might be at play when it comes to explaining why people’s language use changes.
Perceptions of what prompts changes
Since tracking people and their language over the course of their entire lives is not a very feasible research approach, the researchers in this case instead asked participants to reflect on how they thought past life expierences affected their own language use and their feelings about their language choices. In other words, they asked participants to think retrospectively about how and which major life changes affected their use of and attitudes towards standard vs. local Austrian German dialects.
They first presented participants with a list of major events drawn from different categories such as educational shifts (like transitioning from high school to college), work shifts (first job or changing jobs), and personal shifts (romantic involvement, relocations, having children) and then asked them whether they changed their language use or attitudes.
About eighty percent of respondents indicated that a major life event had impacted them linguistically in the last 10 to 20 years. The overall trend was that people shifted toward more standard language following events related to to profession, education, and parenthood. Yet, retirement and personal events like new romances or friendships often moved people toward more dialect usage – regardless of participants’ chronological age.
Another finding was that most significant life events resulted in people increasingly accommodating their speech to that found in their new situation. In other words, as we change jobs, change relationships or change locations, we typically have to adapt to more diverse communicative contexts from those we started with, leading to not just new emotional and behavioral responses, but new linguistic ones as well.
Notably, the researchers found that many of their participants’ important life events, such as getting a first job, having children or retiring, actually occured within similar chronological age ranges. This suggests that the frequent correlations between age and language changes found in many studies might be an artifact of when such life events tend to happen rather than the influence of chronological age itself.
From perception to reality
This type of exploratory study, based on participants’ recollections of how they’ve changed their language behavior over their lifespans, provides a starting point for better understanding how and why chronological age correlates with linguistic changes – and will help future researchers decide what major life stages to focus on as they study people’s actual language use in real time.
