ABSTRACT
Age is sociolinguistics’ under-developed social dimension. 1 Sociolinguistics has, for example, made an outstanding contribution to gender research, providing one of the cornerstones of modern feminist scholarship. Ethnic and race-related cultural patterns and differences and politics are, similarly, focal concerns in sociolinguistics with diverse and compelling literatures. Theoretical and empirical research centring on social class was, especially in the UK, one of the discipline’s earliest, and ultimately most controversial, passions. By comparison, sociolinguistic research on age and ageing is, with only a few specific exceptions, rare. The most important exceptions are paradigms that have dealt with early parts of the life course — language development, variation and use in childhood and in adolescence, early bilingualism, and language use in educational settings. As this suggests, sociolinguistics has conceptualised the process of ageing mainly in relation to changes in early life — maturation and the acquisition and deployment of communicative competences.
