Numerous studies have shown that some speech accommodation in interactions with the elderly can aid communication. "Over"accommodaters, however, employing features such as high pitch, exaggerated prosody, and child-like forms of address, often demean, infantilise, and patronise elderly interlocutors rather than facilitate comprehension.…

Informed by family language policy (FLP) as the theoretical framework, I illustrate in this paper how language ideologies can be incongruous and language policies can be conflicting through three multilingual families in Singapore representing three major ethnic groups--Chinese, Malay and Indian. By studying their family language audits, observing…