The Scottish Gaelic language has been in decline since the fourteenth century, when its speakers were a majority of Scotland's population, due to the higher prestige of Scots, then later of English.

[5] Although the decline of the fishing industry following World War II had impacted the local dialect's viability,[1] when Nancy Dorian started studying the dialect in 1963, 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.

[6] Dorian found that the Gaelic language was able to adapt to modern life even while becoming moribund, because speakers were able to borrow words from English and apply them to any discussion, even for highly technical topics.

[9] Certain types of syntactic distinctions, such as grammatical gender, case markings, and the two passive constructions, were lost gradually, rather than erased wholesale, as some theoreticians had predicted.

[1][11] The East Sutherland dialect became well known in the field of language death based on the research by Nancy Dorian, beginning in 1963.