Emerging Adulthood in Sociolinguistics

In her landmark paper Age as a Sociolinguistic Variable, Eckert states that “age is a person’s place at a given time in relation to the social order: a stage, a condition, a place in history” (1997:151). Speaker age has long been one of the primary social categories within sociolinguistics, and may be argued to be the sociolinguistic category. Indeed, many of our theories about how language varies and what becomes of that variation are built upon notions of how speaker age relates to and reflects language use, including age‐related cut‐offs for the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation (Payne [1980]Locating language in time and space, New York: Academic Press), the apparent time hypothesis of language change (Bailey et al. [1991]Language Variation and Change, 3, 241–64), and the relationship of age to linguistic style (Bakht [2010]Lexical Variation and the Negotiation of Linguistic Style in a Long Island Middle School. New York University). However, as Eckert points out, we often do not go deeply enough into the theoretical background that such uses of age entail and that “the study of age as a sociolinguistic variable … requires that we focus on the nature and social status of age and aging” (Eckert [1997]The handbook of sociolinguistics. Oxford: Blackwell:152). Over the course of the last few decades, however, the nature of age has changed significantly for one specific group, that of emerging adults (Arnett [2004]Emerging adulthood: The winding road from the late teens through the twenties. Oxford: Oxford University Press). The theory of “emerging adulthood,” as developed by Arnett over the last decade (i.e., Arnett [2000]American Psychologist 55(5), 469–80; Arnett [2004]; Arnett [2007]Childhood Development Perspectives 1(2), 68–73; Arnett et al. [2011]Debating emerging adulthood: Stage or process? Oxford: Oxford University Press), is a “new and historically unprecedented period of the life course” (2004:4) that has only recently arisen within “industrialized or ‘postindustrial’ countries” (2004:21) and, therefore, could only have been experienced as a specific life‐stage by those individuals born after 1975 or so. In broad terms, emerging adults are those individuals in industrialized societies who exist in a transitional period between the parental care and stability experienced during adolescence and the self‐sufficiency and stability experienced during adulthood. Though typically made up of individuals aged 18–25, emerging adulthood can span a nu