New speaker
Someone who acquired the language outside the home — through classes, immersion, or deliberate adult effort.
Where a language has stopped being passed on at home, anyone who comes to it afterwards comes to it deliberately: in a classroom, an immersion nest, a recording, a dictionary. ELCat’s point that a dormant language can be “awakened” depends entirely on such people, since by definition no one is left who learned it in childhood.
They are not the same as first-language speakers and the Atlas does not blur them. A count that adds learners to elders produces a healthier-looking figure than the language deserves, and obscures the one thing worth knowing: whether anyone is passing it to children.
But the category is not lesser. Cornish and Manx have children growing up speaking languages their grandparents’ generation did not — which happened because adults learned them first. New speakers are how a language stops being only documented and starts being spoken again.