Do you know the difference between a chipper and a pontie?

Or how to answer the question 'fit like?'? Research has shown the answer is more likely to be yes if you are female.

Linguistic experts have discovered women may hold the key to preserving traditional dialects within Scotland's fishing communities - including the words for a chip shop-sized haddock, a chipper, or an immature haddock, a pontie.

Increasing numbers of people also now know what 'fit like?' - a variation of 'whit like?' - refers to, but their response would very much depend on their mood.

Researchers at Aberdeen University have spent the last six years studying the traditional tongue of fisher folk along the country's east coast as part of the Fisherspeak project.

The study, which was funded by the Arts And Humanities Research Council, looked at how traditional language has changed and evolved with the decline of the fishing industry and a more mobile society.

Linguistic professor Robert McColl Millar said: "We were interested in what happens to language when tight-knit communities change. At one time everyone would have known each other and lived and worked together.

"As a result, small-scale and highly localised dialects developed, characterised by unique vocabulary that changed across a relatively small geographical area."

He said this was demonstrated by the number of different traditional words for seagull along the coast.

Researchers expected change due to more mobile societies, but found that instead of being replaced by standardised English, larger regional dialects have developed.

Professor Miller added he was keen to discover whether young people knew the traditional words spoken in their communities and found many women knew more than men.

He said: "We found many younger people had a rough idea what a word was associated with but could not fully define it.

"In Peterhead, particularly, we found a number of young women had a good understanding of traditional vocabulary of the area.

"This could be explained in part due to connections with heritage industry, but around the coast we were surprised to find many of the words that survived best are associated with the dressing and selling of fish, rather than the size or species of fish.

"It is interesting many of the words most recognisable today relate to the types of role women would have performed within the industry."

However, he said change within communities and the fishing industry could lead to many traditional words being lost.

"This can, in part, be attributed to huge changes in technology," he said. "Many of the local words related to line fishing, such as gartlins (great lines) or scull (basket that held lines), were barely remembered by even the oldest informants.

"But we found language attrition was not just taking place in industry specific words. We asked about words concerned with seaweed - part of the sight and smell experiences of all coastal dwellers, no matter what they do for a living - and found that knowledge of the different words for seaweed was extremely patchy, even among people of essentially the same age and experience.

"Interestingly, people along the coast appear now to think of the local pronunciation of their settlement's name - Week for Wick; Peterheid for Peterhead; Ainster for Anstruther - as being somewhat marked in relation to the mainstream pronunciation; this would probably have been unusual a generation ago.

"Nevertheless, it is very likely larger scale dialects will remain; what will distinguish them from other dialects will be pronunciation rather than different vocabularies."

A book detailing the findings of the Fisherspeak project, Lexical Variation And Attrition In The Scottish Fishing Communities was published in the summer. It was shortlisted by the Saltire Society for its annual prize for Best Academic Book On A Scottish Theme.