Deeside Gaelic

Deeside Gaelic is an extinct dialect of Scottish Gaelic spoken in Aberdeenshire until 1984.^[1] Unlike a lot of extinct dialects of Scottish Gaelic, it is relatively well attested. A lot of the work pertaining to Deeside Gaelic was done by Frances Carney Diack,^[2][3] and was expanded upon by David Clement, Adam Watson^[4] and Seumas Grannd.^[5]

Deeside Gaelic
Aberdeenshire Gaelic
Scottish Gaelic: Gàidhlig Shrath Deathain
Region	Aberdeenshire
Extinct	18 March 1984, with the death of Jean Bain
Language family	Indo-European Celtic Insular Celtic Goidelic Scottish Gaelic Deeside Gaelic
Early forms	Proto-Indo-European Proto-Celtic Proto-Goidelic Primitive Irish
Language codes
ISO 639-1	gd
ISO 639-2	gla
ISO 639-3	gla
Glottolog	scot1245
Braemar Inverey Tullich Glen Muick Strathdon Crathie Strathspey
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Decline

In Aberdeenshire, 18% of Crathie and Braemar and as much as 61% in Inverey were bilingual in 1891.^[6] By 1984, the dialect had died out.

Features in Deeside Gaelic

In the mid-20th Century the Scottish Gaelic Dialect Survey was undertaken when there were still people who spoke Deeside Gaelic. Features of Deeside Gaelic include:

• dropping of unstressed syllables; an example of this is the Word "Duine" becoming "duin'"^[7]
• weakening of the /o/ to a /u/ sound, words such as "Dol" being pronounced closer to "Dul"^[8]
• slender nn being pronounced like an English ng ^[9]
• mutation of f instead of being dropped is pronounced as a /v/ or /b/ or /p/ in Speyside^[10]
• dropping of -adh, words such as tuilleadh being recorded as tull^[11]
• conditional final stop; conditional tense was realised as a /g/ or /k/ sound in Braemar^[12]
• shortening of words; words such as agaibh being pronounced closer to "aki" and cinnteach being shortened to cinnt ^[13]