Scottish man dies, taking town's dialect with him

LONDON (AP) — In a remote fishing town on the tip of Scotland's Black Isle, the last native speaker of the Cromarty dialect has passed away, taking with him a little fragment of the English linguistic mosaic. Academics said Wednesday that Bobby Hogg, who was 92 when he died last week, was the last person fluent in the dialect once common to the seaside town of Cromarty, 175 miles (280 kilometers) north of Edinburgh. "I think that's a terrible thing," said Robert Millar, a linguist at the University of Aberdeen in northern Scotland. "The more diversity in terms of nature we have, the healthier we are. It's the same with language." The demise of an obscure dialect spoken by a few hundred people may not register for most English speakers — "We'll all live," Millar said — but it's part of a relentless trend toward standardization which has driven many regional dialects and local languages into oblivion. Linguists often debate how to define and differentiate the world's many dialects, but most agree that urbanization, compulsory education and mass media have conspired to iron out many of the kinks that make rural speech unique. Cromarty, which counts just over 700 people, is at the very end of a sparsely populated peninsula of forest and farmland. It's separated from Inverness, the closest city, by the Beauly Firth, a wide body of cold water where salmon run and dolphins frolic. The Cromarty dialect included a helping of archaic "thees" and "thous" as well as a wealth of seafaring vocabulary, including three sets of words for "second fishing line." The aspirate "h'' was often added or subtracted, so that "house" would be pronounced "oos" and "apple" would be pronounced "haypel." The "wh" sound was often dropped entirely. A lexicon of Cromarty words, relying in large part on Hogg's speech, gave "Oo thee keepan?" as Cromarty's version of "How are you?" and "Hiv thoo a roosky sazpence i thi pooch?" for "Can you lend me some money?" Urban dialects may be strong — Millar referred to "Toonserspik," the "town speech" of cities like Aberdeen — but he said they don't replace what's being lost. He said urban dialects tend to be more similar to one another than their rural counterparts, with an emphasis on differences in pronunciation over differences in vocabulary. And even rival cities like Glasgow and Edinburgh "sound more like each other than they used to." Author Mark Abley, who has written about the dynamism of the English language, agrees. "I don't believe there's a straightforward balancing act in which urban dialects grow as rural ones shrink," he said in an email. "Cities are always melting pots, and isolation for any group is very hard to maintain." As the worlds' melting pots grow ever bigger — half the Earth's population now lives in cities — lesser-known dialects are evaporating. Worldwide, languages are disappearing regularly, with half of the globe's 6,000-plus languages expected to be extinct by the end of the century, according to UNESCO. The British Isles saw two languages go extinct within living memory, UNESCO says. The last native speaker of Alderney French, a Norman dialect spoken in the Channel Islands, died around 1960, and the last speaker of traditional Manx, the language once spoken on the Isle of Man, died in 1974. Donna Heddle, the director of the Center for Nordic Studies at Scotland's University of the Highlands and Islands, said the loss of each language or regional dialect leaves the world poorer than it was before. "It's one less little sparkle in the firmament," she said. "One little star might go out and you might never notice it, but it's not there anymore." ___ Online: The Cromarty Fisherfolk Dialect: http://www.ambaile.org.uk/en/download/files/The%20Cromarty%20Fisherfolk%20Dialect.pdf (PDF) UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger: http://www.unesco.org/culture/languages-atlas/index.php

Last Lost Languages of Our Time: "The Bo Language"

(Video: Linguist Anvita Abbi made recordings of Boa Sr. singing tracditionnal Bo songs and telling stories of her life including 2004 tsunami)

Boa Sr. (circa 1925 - January 26, 2010[1]) was an Indian Great Andamanese elder. She was the last surviving person who remembered any Bo, a language of the Great Andamanese language family.

Boa Sr. lived through the epidemic brought by the British to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which devastated the Great Andamanese population, and the Japanese invasion and occupation of the Andaman Islands during World War II. Boa Sr.'s mother, who died approximately forty years before her death, was the only living speaker of Bo for a long time. Other members of the Great Andamanese speech community had difficulty understanding the songs and narratives which she knew in Bo. She also spoke the Andamanese dialect of Hindi, as well as Great Andamanese, a mix of the ten indigenous languages of Andamans.

Boa Sr. worked with Anvita Abbi, a professor of linguistics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, since 2005. Abbi studied and recorded Boa's language and songs.

Boa Sr. survived the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake by climbing a tree. She later explained her escape from the tsunami saying, "We were all there when the earthquake came. The eldest told us the Earth would part, don't run away or move."

Her husband, Nao Jer, died several years before she did and the couple had no children. She suffered from some vision loss during her later life, but was considered to be in good health until shortly before her death in 2010.

In accordance with wikipedia, Boa Sr. died at a hospital in Port Blair on January 26, 2010. Boa Sr., who was approximately 85 years old, was the oldest living member of the Great Andamanese tribes at the time. Boa Sr.'s death left just 52 surviving Great Andamanese people in world, none of whom remember any Bo. Their population is greatly reduced from the estimated 5,000 Great Andamanese living in the Andaman Islands at the time of the arrival of the British in 1858.

Book: "The Last Speakers: The Quest to Save the World's Most Endangered Languages"

* First Video: Australian Hidden Language




* Second Video:




* Third Video:




In his book, "The Last Speakers: The Quest to Save the World's Most Endangered Languages" (National Geographic Books, 2010), K. David Harrison and his team traveled around the world to interview the few remaining speakers of dying languages, from Siberia to Bolivia.


Nearly 7,000 languages are spoken on Earth, and somewhere between 60% and 80% of them have yet to be documented. As speakers sw More..itch to global tongues, such as English and Spanish, they lose not only the ability to converse in their local languages but also the detailed cultural knowledge that these languages embody. Linguists estimate that a language dies every 14 days.


Below is a map showing the locations of some of these last speakers and the languages whose words they carry.

Last Lost Languages of Our Time: "The Eyak"

* First Video: Marie Jones Smith (Last Eyak language speaker)




(Video: Chief Marie Smith Jones Prays for the Eyaks in this excerpt from the 1995 Documentary: "More Than Words")


Marie Smith Jones (May 14, 1918 – January 21, 2008) was the last surviving speaker of the Eyak language of Southcentral Alaska. She was born in Cordova, Alaska, was an honorary chief of the Eyak Nation and the last remaining full-blooded Eyak. In a 2005 interview, Smith Jones explained that her name in Eyak is Udach' Kuqax*a'a'ch which, she said, translates as "a sound that calls people from afar".

According to the BBC, Marie Smith Jones was a champion of indigenous rights and conservation. She died at her home in Anchorage.

She helped the University of Alaska compile an Eyak dictionary, so that future generations would have the chance to resurrect it.

Nearly 20 other native Alaskan languages are at risk of disappearing.


* Second Video: "Parlez-Vous Eyak?"




The Eyak, Alaska Native Language, gets an unlikely chance at revival with the help and inspiration of a young man living half way around the world.


Guillaume from France learn the Eyak language at the age of twelve, because the value of keeping humanity heritage alive, according to him, is "important".


But to tell the truth, that "passion" is "priceless".