Somewhat related to tomorrow’s Highland Derby…
Note the proximity of Dingwall and Inverness to Cromarty
I try not to go too far afield with from football with my posts here at the Tanner Ba’, but once in a while there’s something I’d like to share with you even though it is only tangentially related. In this case it is the death last week of Robert Hogg, the last native speaker of the Cromarty dialect, at the age of 92. Cromarty (pronounced more like “crom-iddy”) is a very small town (c.700 inhabitants) on the northernmost tip of the Black Isle. The Black Isle, which is actually a peninsula, separates Inverness and Dingwall, hence the link to tomorrow’s match. Interestingly, to me at least, Cromarty was also the ancestral home of my grandmother’s (the one who was born in Bellshill) neighbors! But I digress…
If you’d like to learn a little more about this and see a few examples of the dialect that Mr. Hogg spoke you can get the general idea from this article in the Toronto Star and if you’d like to delve a little deeper you can go here or here.
