23 Facts About Nancy Dorian

Nancy Currier Dorian 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.

Nancy Dorian was considered "a prime authority" on language death.

Nancy Dorian was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey in 1936.

Nancy Dorian received an MA and PhD from the University of Michigan and taught linguistics and German at Bryn Mawr College from 1965 to 1989, and taught at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Kiel.

Nancy Dorian was a Unitarian Universalist; her hymn Dear Weaver of our Lives' Design won a prize for celebrating feminine imagery of the divine.

Nancy Dorian died suddenly on April 24,2024, in Brunswick, Maine.

Nancy Dorian first noticed the Gaelic language while conducting fieldwork for the Linguistic Survey of Scotland in 1963.

When Nancy Dorian started studying the dialect, there were still more than 200 speakers in Brora, Golspie and Embo, including 105 in Embo, where they were more than a third of the population.

Nancy Dorian coined the term "semi-speaker" for those, mostly from the younger generations, who could speak Gaelic but imperfectly.

Nancy Dorian criticized researchers who focused narrowly on single speakers, which conveniently ignored the variation between speakers.

Nancy Dorian published sixteen years of research on East Sutherland Gaelic as Language Death: The Life Cycle of a Scottish Gaelic Dialect.

Romaine highlighted the multidisciplinary perspective with which Nancy Dorian had approached her work, producing a book that would appeal to ethnographers, sociologists, Celtic scholars, historians of Scotland, and a wide range of linguists, including those specializing in sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, and syntax.

Nancy Dorian identified some counterintuitive ways in which language shift was functioning in East Sutherland, noting that the Gaelic language was able to adapt to modern life even while becoming moribund.

Nancy Dorian's finding that the socioeconomically homogeonous community was characterized by a high degree of variation between speakers was later elaborated in her 2010 book Investigating Variation: The Effects of Social Organization and Social Setting.

Nancy Dorian did not find the same types of linguistic changes which were thought to mark endangered languages.

Nancy Dorian postulated that the type of change in endangered languages was the same as in healthy languages, but the rate of change was greatly accelerated; the defining features of an endangered language were sociolinguistic rather than structural.

Nancy Dorian's research showed that the exclusion of Gaelic from the school curriculum was a major factor in its decline, because it reduced the number of opportunities to use Gaelic and cemented its lower status and "usefulness" in the eyes of the community.

Later research showed that the features that Nancy Dorian identified for Sutherland Gaelic's decline applied to many other obsolescent languages.

Nancy Dorian was inspired to organize this collection of essays when she realized that there were no conferences or journals dedicated to the study of language death, where scholars in the field could share ideas.

Nancy Dorian argues that it is important to analyze the speakers' range and ability to utilize the Gaelic language.

Nancy Dorian concludes this book with notes on field work and the methodologies of working within the community when positioned as an outsider, and utilizes her decades of work to provide an in-depth view of Gaelic language transformation.

Carl Blyth wrote in 1994 that Nancy Dorian "deserves foremost credit for consistently drawing the attention of linguists and anthropologists to the importance of endangered languages".

In 2012 Dorian was awarded the Kenneth L Hale Award by the Linguistic Society of America, an award which recognizes scholars for work on endangered or extinct languages.