Narratives at the Crossroads of Generations and Languages

Narratives in bilingual, intergenerational conversations offer an important site for examining how age identity is verbally constructed when language comprehension itself is also periodically in focus. This study investigates three conversational extracts of an older speaker (one woman, age 86) and her much younger friends (two women, mid-30s), who speak Swedish and American English. Analyses of the Swedish conversations locate where the older speaker accommodates to her listeners by providing glosses and sufficient details to be able to launch and sustain her narratives, while she simultaneously positions herself as older through themes concerning the distant past. The younger interlocutors nonetheless actively seek to accommodate to the discourse structure established by the older speaker with their responses. The article presents a taxonomy of rhetorical patterns that the elder speaker uses to accentuate the age difference between herself and the younger speakers.