When he died recently, Bobby Hogg took the Cromarty fisherfolk dialect out of existence with him, at least as a fluently spoken mother tongue, and the media took notice. The BBC reported on his death, celebrating the unique nature of his native dialect. In an Associated Press report originating in London, his dialect was spoken of as “a little fragment of the English linguistic mosaic.” A knowledgeable University of Aberdeen linguist spoke of this as “the first time that an actual Scots dialect has so dramatically died with the passing of the last native speaker.”

By all accounts (and by a brief sample offered in the BBC article), it was indeed a fascinating dialect, a form of Scots with recognizable Gaelic influence. And it represented, just as a local county councillor and historian said of it, “part of a way of life which is now gone.”

But it’s not alone. Just a little to the north along the Scottish coast, the decline of the fishing industry between the two World Wars left many populations of fisherfolk in decline and left their unusual, strictly local dialects headed for foreseeable extinction. But these were dialects of Gaelic, not of Scots. That is, they were Celtic, rather than speech forms related to English. Balintore, Shandwick, and Hilton, along the south coast of the Fearn Peninsula, still had residual populations of Gaelic-speaking fisherfolk in mid-twentieth century, as did Inver on the northern coast of the same peninsula. Former fisherfolk and their descendants still spoke Gaelic fluently in Embo, Golspie, and Brora on the east coast of Sutherland, the next county to the north, well into the second half of the twentieth century. But the native Gaelic dialects of these areas have vanished entirely as fluently spoken mother tongues, as surely as has the Cromarty dialect of Scots. Each of these forms of Gaelic was highly distinctive, and each could accurately be said to have been a fascinating fragment of the Gaelic linguistic mosaic. More.

See: OUP Blog