Grammatical Change in a dying dialect

Abstract

The dying East Sutherland dialect of Scottish Gaelic shows grammatical change currently in progress in two syntactic environments, the passive and the case system. The rate of change has been rapid enough to show clear differences between the usage of the oldest and the youngest fluent speakers available, a span of just over 40 years. This permits the consideration of questions about the direction of change, the processes of change, and the rate of change, and of the utility of terminal speakers for systematic language description and historical reconstruction.