Aging and language: A case study of a supercentenarian^☆

Abstract

This paper presents a case study of a supercentenarian MST who died at the age of 110. A brief review of the literature on centenarians and their longevity is made that shows the mainstream focus on demography, mortality, heritability, cognition and parameters of longevity. Centenarians’ language performance is generally overlooked except for mentions in MMSE tests. This paper fills the gap by detailed anatomies of MST’s video-taped interview together with data from his life history and many volumes of writing. The interview sample is also looked at as part of a bigger picture of daily living activities. A comparison is also made between MST and a 93-year-old nonagenarian using the 3-welt model of umwelt, innenwelt and lebenswelt. The paper concludes with a bold proposal of conceptualizing language as lived experiences independently from aging and disease.

Keywords

Centenarian language / Here-and-now living / Umwelt / Innenwelt / Lebenswelt

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Gu Yueguo: Writing - original draft, Formal analysis, Conceptualization. Yongwei ZHANG: Software, Resources, Data curation.

Declaration of Competing Interest

This is to declare that the paper has been written without conflicts of interest.

Data Availability

Data will be made available on request.

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