Language Death: The Life Cycle of a Scottish Gaelic Dialect

by Nancy C. Dorian

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

Genres: Linguistics

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Nancy Currier Dorian (1936 - 2024) was an American linguist who carried out research into the decline of the East Sutherland dialect of Scottish Gaelic for over 40 years, particularly in the villages of Brora, Golspie and Embo. Due to their isolation from other Gaelic-speaking communities, these East Sutherland villages presented a good opportunity to study language death. Dorian's study is possibly the longest such study in the field. She was considered "a prime authority" on language death. Language Death: The Life Cycle of a Scottish Gaelic Dialect, her study into the decline of Gaelic in East Sutherland, is considered "the first major monograph" on language death.

Reviews

[Nicholas Hardie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting and technical description of how the Gaelic grammar has changed in the community, comparing old and young speakers, as well as fluent and less fluent. Its accompanied by a considerable sociolinguistic analysis of the community and individual speakers. I believe it was one of the first in depth grammatical investigations into a dying language.