ABSTRACT
According to the United Nations, nearly all countries will witness a massive aging of their population within the next generation. Yet, variationist sociolinguists have rarely focused on the speech of the elderly, making the role of the elderly in models of variation and change a largely understudied area of research. To address this deficit, this chapter analyzes three syntactic variables representing different aspects of grammatical complexity using data from 479 speakers of German, ranging in age from 79 to 101 years, drawn from a large, cross-disciplinary survey. Three indicators of grammatical complexity are assessed: (i) utterance length, (ii) pronominalization rate, and (iii) clause embedding. Seven external variables are considered: cognitive health: (i) DemTect score; social power: (ii) socio-economic occupational status, (iii) personal wealth, (iv) level of education; social network: (v) number of contacts; and, socio-demographic: (vi) gender, (vii) age.
The findings show that pronominalization rate is higher with greater cognitive impairment, lower occupational status, lower education, and smaller social networks. In addition, utterance length is greater with lower cognitive impairment, higher occupational status, higher education, younger age, more wealth, and with men. Finally, clause embedding is greater with higher occupational status, higher education, and the more wealth. While utterance length and pronominalization rate both correlate with properties that are of particular importance with the elderly (cognitive health and age), clause embedding is a robust indicator that correlates only with socio-economic factors. The results of this study demonstrate that any model of lectal cohesion and the speech community must take into account the elderly. Even under the – debatable – assumption that the elderly are not the locus of change, they will exert a growing influence as a counterforce to change.
