The village of Strontian sits at the head of Loch Sunart, on the western coast of Scotland. Its population is just over three hundred.

Most of them speak English. Some of them speak Scots Gaelic. Two of the verbs they use, however, are no longer used in any other Gaelic-speaking community on earth.

The first is sgrobaich. It means, approximately, to gather kindling from under a wet hedge.

The second is tiullaich. It means, approximately, to turn a small boat against the current using only the weight of one's body, not the oars.

Neither verb appears in the standard dictionaries of Scots Gaelic. Neither appears in the recordings made by the School of Scottish Studies in the 1950s and 1960s.

Both appear in the daily speech of approximately eleven people in Strontian, the youngest of whom is forty-six.

The linguist who first documented them is a woman named Iona MacRae. She is a senior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. She first heard sgrobaich in 2014, in a conversation between two men outside a hardware shop.

She did not, at first, realize the word was rare. She wrote it down because she had not heard it before, and she writes down all the words she has not heard before.

It took her three years to determine that the word existed nowhere else. She made the determination by combing through every recorded archive of Scots Gaelic she could access, and by writing to every Gaelic-speaking community she could find an address for.

“It took her three years to determine that the word existed nowhere else.”

No one else used the word. No one else had ever used the word, as far as the records could show.

She began to ask the people of Strontian where the word had come from. They could not tell her. They had always used it. Their parents had used it. They could not remember a time when they had not.

She found tiullaich two years later, in 2019, in a recording she made of a fisherman in his eighties named Donnchadh.

Donnchadh had used the word casually, describing a maneuver he had performed that morning. When MacRae asked him to repeat it, he did, and then he asked her why she was interested.

She told him the word did not appear in the dictionaries. He laughed. He said the dictionaries were written by people who did not own boats.

MacRae has now spent eleven years on the two verbs. She has published four papers. She has not been able to determine where they came from.

Her current hypothesis is that they are survivals from a dialect of Gaelic spoken in a now-depopulated valley to the north of Strontian, called Gleann Cripesdail, abandoned in the early nineteenth century.

She has not been able to prove this. The records of Gleann Cripesdail are thin. The dialect was never recorded.

What she has documented, in great detail, is the way the verbs are used. Sgrobaich is used almost exclusively by women, in the months between October and March. Tiullaich is used almost exclusively by men, and almost exclusively on or near the water.

She has noted that the verbs are not taught. Children pick them up by hearing them. The eleven speakers she has identified all learned the verbs before the age of seven.

She has noted that none of the eleven speakers has ever, in her recordings, used either verb in a sentence that was not also entirely in Gaelic. The verbs do not migrate into English-Gaelic code-switching. They appear only in fully Gaelic utterances.

She has noted that this is unusual. Most Gaelic words, in modern speech, can appear in English sentences as loanwords or quotes. These two do not.

She does not know what to make of this. She suspects it means the verbs are felt, by their speakers, to belong only to a certain kind of speech. A certain register. A certain world.

I asked her, in a conversation in March, whether she thought the verbs would survive.

She said she did not know. She said the youngest speaker was forty-six. She said that of the eleven speakers, two had died in the last three years.

She said she was working on a recording project, with the village school, to teach the verbs to the children. She said she did not know if it would work.

She said the verbs had survived for two centuries without being taught. She said she did not want to be the one who had to start teaching them, but she did not see who else would do it.