Age: Methods and Metadata

Age has proven to be an extremely useful variable in many social science fields, and linguistics is no exception: it is widely used in applied linguistics, psycholinguistics, and (especially) sociolinguistics. This makes sense – given that even casual observation tells us that humans behave differently at different points in the life cycle, it is quite reasonable to take age into account when investigating human behavior. In turn, the use of age as a variable has led to a wide range of methods and analytical tools that rely on the use of age (e.g., the apparent time construct in sociolinguistics). However, it turns out that even though age is often treated in a rather simple way, it is actually a complicated concept that can be difficult to pin down precisely and that the usual linguistic view of age as a simple reflection of the linear passage of time is lacking. That fact has repercussions for how linguists should deal with age, including not just issues like how to record metadata relating to it, but even methodological concerns such as how to do the initial elicitation in the first place.