Cromarty fisherfolk

スコットランドの絶滅危惧方言（言語）に指定されていたクロマーティの最後の話者が亡くなったことをCNNが伝えています。学部時代に言語学の先生から"wh"の発音が存在しない言語の例として教わったことがありました（ちなみに、crom-は「曲がっている」という意味だ、ということも覚えています）。（UG）

Last native speaker of Scots dialect dies

(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."

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/10/05/world/europe/scotland-dead-dialect/index.html?hpt=hp_t3