The Fate Of Morphological Complexity in Language Death: Evidence from East Sutherland Gaelic

Abstract

Simplification in structure, and also confluence between the local-language structure and the prestige-language structure, are usually predicted in language death as in pidginization. For a dying Scottish Gaelic dialect, speakers representing a broad proficiency continuum were tested in the two most excessively complex morphological structures the dialect offers, the noun plural and the gerund. The forms supplied by the semi-speakers at the bottom of the proficiency continuum show considerable simplification, as expected, but very much less than in ‘classical’ pidginization; confluence with English is also quite limited. Marked functional differences between this dying dialect and the typical pidgin are invoked to account for the difference in outcome.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 184 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.