This handsome glossy hardback is one outcome of the Fisher Speak project at the University of Aberdeen. It catalogues the slow loss of the unique lexis of the traditional dialects of the fishing communities in several towns and villages along Scotland's east coast. The book consists of five chapters followed by interesting endnotes, a very full list of references, and a useful index.
The history and culture of the locations included in the study in some cases date back to the fifteenth century—enough time for these settlements to develop marked differences from their agricultural and mercantile neighbours inland. The three authors analyse the lexical changes occurring in their selected towns, and also discuss the challenges associated with the study of language death, a highly problematized domain both in theoretical and practical terms. The best design of a questionnaire, for instance, is touched on, along with insights into the most (and least) successful techniques for eliciting natural data from survey participants.
The book bears the familiar hallmarks of a thesis turned into a publication, with chapters on methodology and data analysis. The account of the pilot study is engaging up to a point but the numbers of individual participants are so low that the relevance of including the large amount of detail is questionable; this section could have been condensed and presented as a table. For international readers, it would have been very helpful to include a map of the coastline to which one could refer when following the linguistic comparisons and contrasts among the various villages. These minor complaints, however, do not detract from the value of the work.
The documented changes are ascribed to lexical variation (i.e. changes in the usage, meaning, and/or form of words) and to attrition, as each dialect is stripped or ‘beheaded’ of the particular lexis which defines it as a discrete entity. As Sasse (The theory of language death, Mattias Brenzinger (ed.), Language death: Factual and theoretical explorations with special reference to East Africa, 1992) points out, language shift is not entirely due to the loss of native speakers but also to the loss of social prestige. So these developments are due both to the disappearing way of life of the fishing communities and to the encroachment of Scottish Standard English as the dominant variety.
A conclusion of the study is that the autonomous status of these Scots fishing dialects is indeed breaking down. Although many of the highly localised phonological and syntactical features are still being retained, specific lexis is gradually dropping out of use. One bright spot is the modern-day use of some Scots lexemes in a deliberate and conscious way as overt identity markers. This seems to be a complex and contradictory phenomenon and it will be interesting to see if it continues. Another optimistic finding is the unexpected quantity of intergenerational lexical transfer that is taking place against the odds, but that, for various reasons, seems unlikely to persist much further into the future. Millar, Barras, and Bonnici have made an important contribution to Scotland by recording some of its distinctive dialects before they are completely lost.
