Terminal speaker
Terminal speaker means the last speaker of a language. A terminal speaker may still be alive, or may have been the last person speaking what is now an extinct language.[1] In the process of language death, the remaining speakers begin to lose some of the vocabulary and grammar of the language, so when there is only a last terminal speaker, the person will not remember a complete form of the language as it had been spoken by a larger community using it in all language domains.
Being a terminal speaker means that the person is bilingual, remembering their heritage language but interacting with their community in another language. The importance of this distinction is seen in the story of Dolly Pentreath of Cornwall. She is believed to have been the last monolingual speaker of Cornish, but there were others who still spoke it for many years, though incompletely.
Terminal speakers are sometimes found by linguists doing language documentation on a language before it dies. A clear example of a terminal speaker being contacted by a linguist is the case of Abegaz, the last speaker of the Mesmes language in Ethiopia.[2] He lived in an isolated hilly area and was about 80 years old when he was contacted by a team of sociolinguistic language surveyors; he has died since that contact. Ned Maddrell was the last speaker of the Manx language, having died in 1974. In 2008, Doris McLemore was reported to be the last speaker of the Wichita language as she worked with a team of linguists to document the language before it died completely.[3] Many more terminal speakers are listed under the Wikipedia category "Last known speakers of a language".
See also[edit]
Notes[edit]
- ^ Polinsky, Maria. 1995. Cross-linguistic parallels in language loss. Southwest Journal of Linguistics 14.1-2 pp. 87-123.
- ^ Ahland, Michael Bryan. (2010). Language death in Mesmes. Dallas: SIL International and the University of Texas at Arlington.
- ^ http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18532656 Web access]
