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Abstract
Based on Caporael's (1981) finding that a fair proportion of Southern Californian nurses use Secondary Babytalk (SBT) when speaking with older residents, this paper overviews a study exploring if, and to what extent, German nurses use SBT, too. In addition, the study seeks to determine more clearly than hitherto who might be the speakers and targets of SBT as well as the variability of recipient responses to it. For this purpose, nurse‐resident interactions were audiotaped in a German nursing home for the aged. Transcriptions have been analyzed along discourse analytical lines. It was found that German nurses indeed use SBT, the typical SBT speaker being middle‐aged and female. The typical SBT recipient tends to be female, physically frail, and either little or very well liked by staff. Analysis of the transcripts revealed that SBT is not necessarily “bad” for residents, since some extremely positive reactions were documented.
