There are not many sociolinguistics studies in Malaysia that focused on age as a factor in language variations. To add to the literature in sociolinguistics field, this study will compare and discuss the language use between two age groups of university students by looking at the similar and different linguistic features. The respondents were three male students aged 19 years old and three male students aged 25 years old who were studying in the same institution. The instrument was a set of questions that was used to interview the respondents on a topic which they favoured the most, football. The interviews were then transcribed and analyzed for the emerging patterns. It was found that the younger students made more grammatical errors and included more fillers than the older ones. Other than that, the juniors made more repetitions of words compared to the seniors who made more repetitions of phrases. In term of vocabulary, both groups used a lot of adjectives and registers in their speeches at almost the same frequency. The juniors, however, tend to use swear word in their speeches compared to the seniors who did not use swear word at all. It can be concluded from the findings that junior students committed more errors than senior students as there were differences in terms of grammatical errors, fillers and repetition made by the two different age groups.
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In-Text Citation: (Abdullah, Safrudin, Taib, & Ismail, 2018)
To Cite this Article: Abdullah, N. H., Safrudin, E. M. S. E., Taib, S. A., & Ismail, W. N. F. W. (2018). Language Variation According to Age: Football Talk. International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, 8(2), 758–769.
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