Comparison
The features of elderspeak, and what to say instead
August 17, 2026 · 4 min read
Kristine Williams, a nursing researcher at the University of Kansas, gave this register its name and built the training that measures whether people can drop it. Most of it lives in six habits, and each one carries a message the speaker didn’t intend to send. Below: what it sounds like, what it tells the listener, and the ordinary-voice version.
Endearments aimed at someone who isn’t yours
| Instead of | Try |
|---|---|
| ”Up you come, dear." | "Do you want a hand up?" |
| "Good job, young lady." | "That’s the last of them.” |
What it signals: names reserved for small children and for people you’re intimate with, applied to someone who is neither, mark them as a person to be handled rather than addressed. The strange part is how one-directional it runs. Nobody calls their nurse sweetheart.
The collective “we”
| Instead of | Try |
|---|---|
| ”Shall we get our coat on?" | "It’s cold out. Do you want your coat?" |
| "Did we have a good sleep?" | "Did you sleep?” |
What it signals: one person’s business, spread across two, so that the person whose business it is goes missing inside the pronoun. Nobody is unclear about whose coat it is, which is what makes the we feel like a costume.
The slowed pace
| Instead of | Try |
|---|---|
| Half your normal speed, one word at a time | Your normal speed, then an actual pause for the answer |
What it signals: slowing down for someone who never asked you to says you’ve already settled the question of whether they can keep up. What most people actually need is not a slower sentence but a gap at the end of it, which is the part that usually gets skipped.
The raised volume
| Instead of | Try |
|---|---|
| Pitching it at the whole room in case they missed it | Your usual volume, facing them, with the television off |
What it signals: two things at once. That deafness is being assumed from age rather than established, and that their private business is now audible to everyone else in the kitchen. If hearing genuinely is the problem, volume is a blunt instrument for it, and your parent can tell you what helps.
Grammar trimmed down
| Instead of | Try |
|---|---|
| ”Pills. Now. Good." | "Your pills are on the counter." |
| "Bath first. Then dinner. Okay?" | "I was going to run the bath before dinner, unless you’d rather eat first.” |
What it signals: the vocabulary and syntax on offer to a four-year-old. It is the feature people are least aware of, because it feels like being clear, and it arrives fastest when you’re in a hurry.
The turned-up ending
| Instead of | Try |
|---|---|
| ”You’d like the blue one, wouldn’t you?" | "Which one do you want?" |
| "We’re not going to make a fuss about this, are we?" | "How do you want to handle it?” |
What it signals: a question with the answer already inside it, asking only to be agreed with. It looks like a choice on the way out of your mouth and arrives as an instruction, which is why it draws more argument than a plain request would.
The test that sorts the list
None of this makes warmth suspect. Affection between two adults who like each other has always had its own vocabulary, and a family with a lifetime of nicknames doesn’t need to file them down.
The test is a substitution. Take the sentence you just said and put a colleague in it, or the neighbor across the street who happens to be fifty. If it comes out fine, it was warmth. If it comes out strange, or faintly comic, the thing making the difference was the age of the person you said it to, and that is the whole register in one move. It shows up in shops and at bank counters and at holiday tables long before anybody in the family has used the word caregiver.
Related: What is elderspeak? for where the term comes from and what the trial found, and How to help an aging parent without taking over for the four moves that go with the ordinary voice. The longer argument is in Talking to the People Who Taught You to Talk.
From the essay: Read the full piece →
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