Cromarty Fisher Scots

Cromarty fisher Scots was a distinctive dialect of Scots — a West Germanic variety closely related to English — spoken by the fisherfolk community of Cromarty, a small port at the tip of the Black Isle in the Scottish Highlands. A form of North Northern Scots, it grew among families thought to have moved north from the Firth of Forth in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and it developed in the relative isolation of a tight-knit fishing town into something outsiders found hard to follow.

The dialect carried a vocabulary built around the sea and the work of fishing, much of it with obscure origins — words such as amitan for a fool and belligut for a greedy person, and densely specialized fishing terms like “o the teydin” for the seventh fishing line. It was marked by a lilting, sing-song delivery and by an unusual treatment of the initial h sound, which speakers dropped from some words and added to others. Idioms could be wholly opaque to a visitor; a request for breakfast might come out as a complaint about being “sconfished wi hayreen” — fed up with herring — and a wish for ham and eggs instead.

The dialect’s fate was bound to the fishery that sustained it. As the herring and white-fishing economy contracted and then collapsed across the twentieth century, and as fishing was industrialized in the 1950s, the working life that the vocabulary described disappeared. Young people left Cromarty or shifted to broader Scots and standard English, and within a few decades the dialect contracted to a small number of elderly speakers and finally to two brothers.

Those brothers were Bobby Hogg and Gordon Hogg. Gordon died in 2011, leaving Bobby as the last fluent speaker; Bobby Hogg died on 2 October 2012, aged 92. His death was widely reported as the end of the dialect — described as the first distinct dialect lost in Scotland in living memory. Before they died, the brothers had helped researchers record a glossary and audio archive of their speech.