The sisters caring for cognitively impaired elderly nuns in a Midwestern convent spoke to their care recipients in a way that sounded strikingly different to linguistic anthropologist Anna Corwin.
The nuns rarely used “elderspeak”—a loud, slow, simple, patronizing, and common form of baby talk for seniors.
Instead, Corwin reports, they told jokes, stories, and blessed the sick nuns, all the while speaking to them like they were completely capable, even though their ability to communicate was significantly diminished.
“It is beautiful watching these nuns,” Corwin, a professor at Saint Mary’s College of California in Moraga, said in an interview. “They accept decline. They value a person in a sort of inherent way.”
Corwin observed the nuns caring for their infirm sisters from 2008 until 2013. Altogether, she spent 10 months watching and listening. In a paper published in the journal The Gerontologist, she dissects the verbal interactions of caregiving nuns ministering to their elders during 26 visits that she recorded.
Three caregivers visited 12 sick nuns between the ages of 81 and 92 in their rooms, where they were bedridden or confined to reclining chairs, for 10 to 25 minutes at a time. The nuns in the infirmary suffered from dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, aphasia, stroke, and neurological deterioration. All had limited or impaired communication abilities.
