Fisher revival

[Damien Hall]

In Scottish fishing communities, anyway, _fisherfolk_ seems to be used as a gender-neutral word for 'people who fish (or are to do with the fishing community)'. It does seem as if it has an in-group connotation, though: you seem to have to be in some way involved with these communities, or at least researching them, in order to use the word legitimately.

Lots of examples can be found by Googling the term on the University of Aberdeen site specifically (if you Google without the site restriction, the top results are all clearly folkloric or to do with a band of that name, and don't seem to be modern usages of the term to describe people's present-day lives).  I came to the U. Aberdeen site because I knew that Robert McColl Millar there had led a project on lexical attrition in fishing communities, and I thought it actually had the word _fisherfolk_ in the title, but the word isn't actually mentioned in Dr McColl Millar's website, though the project is.

Damien

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Damien Hall

University of Kent (UK)
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, 'Towards a New Linguistic Atlas of France'

English Language and Linguistics, School of European Culture and Languages

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