Nancy Dorian

American linguist

Nancy Currier Dorian (1936–April 24, 2024) 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. Due to their isolation from other Gaelic speaking communities, these East Sutherland villages presented a good opportunity to study language death. Dorian's study is possibly the longest such study in the field. She was considered "a prime authority" on language death. Language Death: The Life Cycle of a Scottish Gaelic Dialect, her study into the decline of Gaelic in East Sutherland, is considered "the first major monograph" on language death. According to linguist Joan Argenter, Dorian's name "is well known to scholars working in" several areas of linguistics.

Nancy Dorian was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey in 1936. Raised in nearby Highland Park, she graduated from Highland Park High School in 1954. She studied German at the Connecticut College for Women and graduated summa cum laude in 1958. She received an MA (1961) and PhD (1965) from the University of Michigan and taught linguistics and German at Bryn Mawr College from 1965 to 1989, and also taught at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Kiel. Dorian was a professor emeritus at Bryn Mawr. She was a Unitarian Universalist; her hymn Dear Weaver of our Lives' Design won a prize for celebrating feminine imagery of the divine. Dorian first noticed the Gaelic language while conducting fieldwork for the Linguistic Survey of Scotland in 1963. Noting that a declining localized speech form offered a chance to find out what sorts of changes took place as a speech form passed out of use, she began a long term study of variation and change in East Sutherland Gaelic. When 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. Although traditional practice calls for anthropologists to change fieldwork settings, health challenges led Dorian to continue study of East Sutherland language development, a situation that had the beneficial side effect of producing a study of unprecedented scope and continuity. Previous researchers had focused on the NORM (non mobile old rural male) speakers, who had more conservative language, at the expense of the wider speech community. She coined the term "semi speaker" for those, mostly from the younger generations, who could speak Gaelic but imperfectly. Her attention to the way that speech competence develops differently in endangered and obsolete languages led socio linguists to take an interest in understanding different speaker types and their relations to the process of language shift and language shift reversal. Dorian criticized researchers who focused narrowly on single speakers, which conveniently ignored the variation between speakers. Dorian analyzes language ideology and the importance of its contribution in language shift. She argues that it is important to analyze the speakers' range and ability to utilize the Gaelic language. 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. According to a review by linguist Lenore A. Grenoble, the most striking thing about the book is that it has relevance in its field today considering the book spans decades of work. Also, anthropologist Emily McEwan Fujita's review comments on its value as a resource for students and scholars. Grenoble also highlights the usefulness of publishing a book of these collections that allows for easier access where tracking down older articles may be difficult.

Carl Blyth wrote in 1994 that Dorian "deserves foremost credit for consistently drawing the attention of linguists and anthropologists to the importance of endangered languages". In 2005, Dorian was the subject of a documentary that aired on BBC Alba: "Mar a Chunnaic Mise: Nancy Dorian agus a' Ghàidhlig" ("As I saw it: Nancy Dorian and Gaelic"). The documentary focused on her work on East Sutherland Gaelic. 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. Dorian's award credited her for "research on Scots Gaelic that spans a period of almost fifty years—perhaps the most sustained record of research on any endangered language; and for her effective advocacy for the cause of endangered language preservation and revitalization. Hers was one of the earliest and one of the most prominent voices raised in support of endangered languages." Dorian received an honorary degree from Glasgow University in 2015.