Call for papers AAA 2011: Constructing Age Differences: Language Ideology and Language Socialization

[Elise Berman]

Dear all,

Below is a call for papers on a panel titled: Constructing Age Differences: Language Ideology and Language Socialization.

Please send abstracts to me by March 7th if interested in participating. Also, if you are planning to send an abstract, please e-mail me as soon as possible so that I know the level of interest.  Finally, if you are interested but are unable to complete an abstract by March 7th, please let me know.  Below is a draft of the panel abstract.


Many thanks,
Elise Berman

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Constructing Age Differences: Language Ideology and Language Socialization. 

Studies of language ideology have shown that, generally speaking, people believe that individuals of different social statuses speak differently. This belief in an iconic relationship between speech and personhood has been shown to affect not only the way people speak, but also their pragmatic power as actors and speakers (Irvine and Gal 2000). Numerous studies, moreover, have uncovered ideologies of language in relation to social class, race, and gender. What about age?

Language socialization scholars, for their part, have shown that children speak differently than adults not only because of their developmental abilities, but because they are socialized into communicative norms appropriate to their social status (Ochs and Schieffelin 1984). Such findings can be applied to people of all ages: people in different developmental stages of life speak differently from each other in manners fitting to their age-related status. How does the fact that people are not only socialized through language, but are also socialized into age-appropriate forms of expression, relate to linguistic ideologies?

This panel brings together two sub-disciplines of linguistic anthropology – language ideology and language socialization – to analyze the relationship between age as a social differentiator and ideologies of speech.  Age has not yet been sufficiently analyzed with respect to how language ideologies give people of different ages differential power and abilities. Therefore, this panel asks: What are the ideologies of how people of different ages speak? What is the relation between ideologies of language and developmental linguistic capacities? How do these ideologies affect and reflect not only actual speech, but people's  pragmatic power as speakers and actors? As people age, how do they move through different ways of speaking and different beliefs about how they speak? Finally, how do language ideologies both presuppose and create differentiations between age groups, thus giving people of different ages different linguistic and social roles in communities?

By combining insights from language ideology and language socialization, this panel intends to advance our understanding of age as a social classifier. In doing so, it focuses on how age differences are made and marked.  It also examines how such differences change over developmental time as people move into different roles as they age, thereby maintaining or altering their speech patterns while leaving traces of the age they used to be.