Nancy Dorian

This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (June 2011)

Nancy C. Dorian is an American linguist^[1] who has carried out research into the death of the East Sutherland dialect of Scottish Gaelic for over 40 years, particularly in the villages of Brora, Golspie and Embo.

She received her Ph.D from the University of Michigan and is a former professor in linguistics and anthropology at Bryn Mawr College. Working for the Linguistic Survey of Scotland in 1963, there was little expectation at the time of finding Gaelic locally spoken but Dorian found over 200 Gaelic speakers. Her study into the decline of Gaelic in East Sutherland is considered an important and detailed study of language death.

She studied young people who could speak Gaelic but didn't speak it often ('semi-speakers') and noted their ability to quickly return to fluency with effort.

Quotes

She observed the discomfort and hostility shown by some of these speakers, 'Who wanted nothing more than to be inconspicuous'.

• "The Gaelic-speaking East Sutherland fisherfolk have in one sense already been proven 'wrong', in that some of the youngest members of their own kin circles have begun to berate them for choosing not to transmit the ancestral language and so allowing it to die." ( Language Death, David Crystal, p106 )

Books

• East Sutherland Gaelic: The Dialect of the Brora, Golspie, and Embo Fishing Communities, 1978, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies
• Language Death: The Life Cycle of a Scottish Gaelic Dialect, 1981, University of Pennsylvania Press
• Tyranny of Tide: An Oral History of the East Sutherland Fisherfolk , 1984, Karoma Pub
• Investigating Obsolescence: Studies in Language Contraction and Death ( Editor ), 1992, Cambridge University Press

References

Sources

• Mar a Chunnaic Mise: Nancy Dorian agus a Ghàidhlig, BBC Alba 2005

External links

• Lexical Loss Among the Final Speakers of an Obsolescent Language: a formerly-fluent speaker and a semi-speaker compared, Paper published online June 1997
• Using a Private-sphere Language for a Public-sphere Purpose: Some Hard Lessons from Making a TV Documentary in a Dying Dialect (Word Document View as HTML), talk delivered to the emeritus faculty at Bryn Mawr College, 16 March 2006, by Nancy Dorian

This article on a linguist is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e