Age

IT would be logical to expect differences in life-style, employment, or political interests as between the generations to be matched by a difference in language use. The exact nature of language variation by generation varies with the passage of years, so the specific linguistic points noted in 1915 or 1945 as characteristic of the French ‘younger generation’ will be quite different from those observed in 1990. Some of the linguistic differences will correlate, not merely with differences of age, but with the different social realities facing the generations: relations between parents and children are not what they were forty years ago, and social change and economic realities have an effect on the nature of language even if it is only in the interpretation to be given to individual words such as chômage or cohabitation.

Sociologists generally feel that the intergenerational conflict which marked the 1960s in France has not continued: ‘All the surveys carried out among those aged below twenty show that young French people have in general few problems with their parents’ (Mermet 1985, 111). The need to establish one's own identity, to be different from one's parents, is perhaps therefore not so marked in the late 1980s and early 1990s as it was in the 1950s and 1960s.