By Jamie Hamilton, for CNN
updated 6:59 PM EDT, Fri October 5, 2012
The dialect spoken in the in the northern Scotland fishing village of Cromarty appears to be the only Germaic descendant in which no "wh" pronunciation existed.
(CNN) -- Bobby Hogg, the last native speaker of a dialect originating from a remote fishing village in northern Scotland, has died -- and so has the dialect he spoke.
The death of the 92-year-old retired engineer means that the Scots dialect known as Cromarty fisherfolk is now consigned to a collection of brief, distorted audio clips.
It is the first unique dialect to be lost in Scotland, according to Robert Millar, a reader in linguistics at the School of Language and Literature at Aberdeen University.
"Usually minority dialects end up blending in with standard English to form a hybrid. However, this is a completely distinct dialect which has become extinct," he said.
Cromarty fisherfolk appears to be the only descendant from the Germanic linguistic world in which no "wh" pronunciation existed, Millar said.
"'What' would become 'at' and 'where' would just be 'ere'," he said.
It was also the Scots language's only dialect that dropped the "H" aspiration.
"The loss of Cromarty is symptomatic of a greater, general decline in the use of the Scots language," according to Director of Scottish Language Dictionaries Chris Robinson. "This should be a wake-up call to save other struggling dialects."
Ten miles down the coast from Cromarty is Avoch, another sleepy fishing village with the closest surviving dialect to Cromarty fisherfolk, one that may also be endangered, according to Robinson. "It looks more than likely that this will go the same way as the Cromarty dialect," he said.
The dialect of the peoples who originally resided on the shores of Cromarty -- which lies on the tip of Black Isle peninsula, a four-hour drive north of Edinburgh -- was directly linked to their traditional fishing methods.
However, during the industrialization of fishing in the 1950s, established working methods were lost and the connection between the way of life and the dialect eroded. In fewer than 30 years, much of the dialect became obsolete.
Millar argues that the decline in Scots language represents a wider global trend.
"Generally, in the literate world, local dialects are suffering. The highly mobile and technologically advanced areas of the world are worst affected," he said.
There are some 6,000 to 7,000 languages in the world and it is estimated that they are disappearing at a rate of one every two weeks, according to Millar.
Some 96% of the world's population speak just 4% of the world's languages, he said. "Most languages are only spoken by a few hundred people," he added.
Why mourn the loss of a language? "At a banal level, it's a little bit of color in our lives is gone," he said. "Any time something dies, it's lost. Whether it be languages or species, we lose something. Everyone in the world loses something. Diversity surely is a good thing, and we've just lost a bit of it."
Greater communication and interdependence among communities is resulting in "dialect homogenization," Millar said.
And people tend to abandon their own languages for one of the larger languages for good reasons, according to Anthony Aristar, professor of linguistics at Eastern Michigan University and director of the school's Institute for Language Information and Technology.
"They want modern conveniences; they want their children to have decent jobs," he told CNN in a telephone interview. "All this requires being able to speak in the dominant language. So they see little use in preserving their languages."
But the loss of a language often results in the loss of the stories that were told in that language, and in the cultural knowledge they contained. "Even medical know-how," he said.
Robinson, of the Scottish Language Dictionaries, maintains that Scots minority dialects like Cromarty have faced other pressures.
"Educationally, English has been the language used in Scotland since the 18th century. Consequently, Scots speakers are not literate in their own language. Also, until recently, Scots has had a social stigma attached to it as a working-class or second-rate language."
Yet there are signs of improvement for the state of Scots minority dialects. More Scots books, especially children's books, are being published than ever before. In addition, since 2009, the Scottish government has provided funding for the Scottish Language Dictionaries, which has also given the language a status boost.
The support has been seen as a natural progression from the move by Westminster in 2002 to sign the European Union Charter of Minority and Regional Languages recognizing Scots, Gaelic and Welsh as languages separate from English.
Still, the rate of the worldwide loss of dialects and languages remains consistent.
Robinson said he would like to see more efforts taken to safeguard minority Scots dialects.
"Scots has an amazing literary history, yet it is completely ignored in our schools," he said. "The books must be made more widely available and read more in schools for the language to survive in the future."
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From The Daily Mail;
Final word from Cromarty: Scottish Black Isle dialect silenced forever as last native speaker dies aged 92
By Jane Borland
PUBLISHED: 20:17 GMT, 3 October 2012
It was a traditional dialect used for centuries by fisherfolk.
But yesterday it emerged that the language of Cromarty had finally died with the passing of its last speaker.
Bobby Hogg was the only person still fluent in the age-old tongue of the Black Isle and his death at the age of 92 means it will now exist only in audio recordings.
Mr Hogg, a retired engineer, said recently he could still close his eyes, see the boats heading out to sea and hear the unique speech pattern – never normally written down – that set his people apart.
His younger brother Gordon had been the other surviving speaker – but he died in April last year, aged 86.
Yesterday, Dr Robert McColl Millar, of Aberdeen University’s linguistic department, said Mr Hogg’s death was highly significant.
He added: ‘It is the first time that an actual Scots dialect has so dramatically died with the passing of the last native speaker.
‘This was always going to be the danger of the Black Isle, as there were so few speakers even when it was healthy, when the fishing was still good.
‘So Bobby Hogg’s passing is a very sad day. It was a very interesting dialect and was unlike any of the others.
‘There are one or two who still have some facility in the Cromarty fisherfolk dialect but most of the time they speak Highland English.
Bobby was the last fluent native speaker who spoke no other tongue from a child. He was what we term a “dense” speaker. So all we have now are the recordings.’
Mr Hogg, who died on Sunday, had worked across Britain, but kept coming back to Cromarty.
His wife Helen was a direct descendent of the community’s most celebrated son, 19th century polymath Hugh Miller.
But the Hoggs were from the fishing community. In 2007, the brothers were recorded by Am Baile, the project that has created a digital archive of the history and culture of the Highlands and Islands.
Mr Hogg said: ‘Our father was a fisherman and all his folk had been fishermen stretching way back. It was the same on our mother’s side too. When we were young, we talked differently in the fishertown to the rest of Cromarty.
‘It wasn’t written down. It was an oral culture. We had this sort of patois, which I think had both Doric and Gaelic in it.
'There were words, a lot to do with the fishing, which nobody else could understand. It is dying out. You hear a smattering in some things people from Cromarty say, but nobody speaks it fluently but for us.’
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From the Washington Post;
Posted at 09:48 AM ET, 10/05/2012
‘Cromarty fisherfolk’: Another rare language dies in Scotland
By Olga Khazan
The last native speaker of an obscure English dialect known as Cromarty fisherfolk died this week in a tiny fishing town on Scotland’s Black Isle, making his a recently disappeared rare world language.
“Bobby Hogg, who was 92 when he died, was the last person fluent in the dialect once common to the seaside town of Cromarty, 175 miles north of Edinburgh,” the AP reported.
While few people may mourn the demise of Cromarty specifically, it’s another example of the one language that dies every two weeks and a general trend toward linguistic standardization as the global population moves to cities. UNESCO expects half of the globe’s 6,000-plus languages to die off by the end of the century.
So what did Cromarty sound like?
The New Statesman has this excerpt:
"Am fair sconfished wi hayreen; gie’s fur brakwast lashins o am and heggs. (I’m so fed up with herring, give me plenty of ham and eggs for breakfast.)”
And the AP offers up even more:
“Holl tol / Very drunk
Foamin for want / Desperate for tea
At’s theer trouble? / What’s your trouble?
Theer nae tae big fi a sclaffert yet! / You’re not too big for a slap!”
You can listen to exerpts of interviews with Hogg and his (now-deceased) brother Gordon at the Scottish history site Am Baile, which has documented the dialect. In this excerpt, the Hoggs give a run-down of Cromarty fish names:
Bobby: When ye take the different names of fish, they're different in Cromarty to what they are everywhere else, like. Different names. So that's only the start, like. Same wi the line fishing an, ye know, all the things relative to it, right? These things have all disappeared now. Folk don't know what ye're talking about, even.
Gordon: No.
Interviewer: So what are some o the names?
Gordon: Well, a plashack - that's a big, a big flat fish. We call that a plashack.
Gordon: An we call others ones - there's one they call it - it's a biggar-man, an it's a, it's a flounder too. It's a flounder but it's -
Bobby: It's biggar-man - you'll find that in the Scottish Dictionary. It's a flounder, a black flounder, right? Say it's a biggar-man in Cromarty.
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From The New Statesman;
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/lifestyle/2012/10/death-cromarty-fisherfolk-dialect
The death of the Cromarty fisherfolk dialect
By Helen Lewis Published 04 October 2012 13:38
Listening to extinct languages and dialects is an eerie, but incredible, experience.
The last native speaker of the Cromarty fisherfolk dialect, Bobby Hogg, has died - and with him, a version of our language which had unique words, expressions and character.
You can listen to Hogg and his brother Gordon speaking here: the dialect has a lilting, sing-song quality. Linguists think it was influenced by Norse and Dutch, and survived because of the close-knit community and relative geographical isolation of Cromarty in the Scottish Highlands.
We're lucky that in 2009, a researcher called Janine Donald set out to preserve and record as much of the Cromarty dialect as she could. She wrote up her findings here, and it's quite hard to see what the roots of some of the words are that were in use. For example, where did "amitan", meaning "a fool" come from? (Also, can we revive "belligut" for "a greedy person"?)
"Am fair sconfished wi hayreen; gie’s fur brakwast lashins o am and heggs." (I’m so fed up with herring, give me plenty of ham and eggs for breakfast.)
Unsurprisingly, there's a lot of specialist vocabulary relating to fishing, which I imagine is now gone for good, like "o the teydin" meaning "seventh fishing line".
There's always something poignant about the death of a last speaker of a language, pidgin, creole or dialect. According to K. David Harrison's film for National Geographic, in 2010 there were around 7,000 languages in the world, but they were disappearing at the rate of one every two weeks. Dialects and other particular sub-forms of a language, therefore, are probably disappearing more regularly. For example, linguists think that only two forms of Gaelic will survive.
Thankfully, after years of neglect, there are now several organisations doing their best to capture these languages and dialects before an increasingly interconnected world means they are lost for ever.
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NOTE: Before he died Bobby Hogg and his brother helped compile a brief glossary of Comarty-Scots which I have a copy of. I will post some examples form it in the future.
http://www.ambaile.org.uk/en/item/item_page.jsp?item_id=131892
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