Language, ageing and ageism: a project for applied linguistics?

Ten years of an interdisciplinary programme of research into language and ageing is reviewed in this paper. Framed as a cumulative programme drawing on sociolinguistics and the social psychology of language, the research has nevertheless foregrounded many criterial issues in the debate about priorities in applied linguistics (as these have been summarised in Rampton's paper, preceding this in the present collection). A review of the research on ageing focusses on issues of: multi‐disciplinarity versus inter‐disciplinarity; research orientations to ‘subject’ populations; ethical imperatives in language research; interactivity; and linguistic versus ideological perspectives. At least implicitly, a case is presented for considering research on language and ageing as falling within an ideologically grounded applied linguistics.