Language and age identities among older Greek Cypriot women
Abstract
This contribution discusses the language and social practices of older Greek Cypriot
women. It looks at the casual, every-day interactions of an all-female group, with a
long interactional history (most of them in their seventies). The ethnomethodological
approach to identities is adopted, and a toolkit from membership categorisation
analysis and conversation analysis is used. This paper shows how the participants
employ various terms, with distinct meaning and associated features, to categorise
self and others as “older women”. The discussion includes certain emblematic uses of
code-switching between (varieties of) Cypriot Greek and Standard Modern Greek and
shows how this discourse strategy contributes to the construction of old-age identities
with distinct associations. On the whole, this bottom-up analysis provides an overview
of older Cypriot women’s situated understanding of their age identities and how the
deployment of various category labels of different registers ultimately achieves positive
self-presentation and dissociation from age-induced decline.