Seniors, Older People, the Elderly, Oldies, and Old People: What Language Reveals about Stereotypes of Ageing in Australia

Abstract

Researchers in an Australian Research Council funded project titled ‘The Cultural Model of Ageing: The Australian Conceptualisation of the Third Age’ created a SurveyMonkey questionnaire for speakers of Australian English that sought to identify the characteristics of reference sets for five noun phrases commonly used to label older Australians. 654 selfselected participants were asked which one of the five noun phrases was best matched to each of 25 characteristics found frequently in the media. The results are reported in this paper, and they are interesting. The notion of semantic stereotypes is reviewed in preparation for the discussion of such results as the following. The NP seniors is associated with positive personal characteristics of health and well-being such as ‘like to travel’, ‘lead an involved and active life’, ‘are vibrant and full of purpose’. The NP older people is also associated with positive characteristics, but somewhat less so than seniors and also more socially (other) oriented. Older people are seen to ‘benefit the workforce through their experience’, ‘have wisdom and can always be turned to for advice’, ‘play an important role in their extended family’s life’. By contrast, the characteristics of those typically referred to by the NP the elderly are negative in the sense that the referents are incompetent or impose a burden on society, cf. ‘are frail and fall more often’, ‘are often victims of mental and physical abuse’, ‘are unable to look after themselves and depend on others for help’. The referents of the NPs old people and oldies have no particular set of characteristics assigned to them; perhaps that is why they only figure in the one (negative) characteristic ‘are tight-fisted with money’ that itself is not strongly associated with any one of the five NPs: 28% old people, 23% the elderly, 20% older people, 14.5% oldies, 14.5% seniors. These results are discussed in some detail in the light of differences among different age groupings of the participants.