Drawing on earlier speaker profiles provided by Bloomfield for the Menomini-speaking community, and speaker profiles for a contemporary receding Tariana-speaking community (provided by Aikhenvald) and a contracting Gaelic-speaking Scottish community, this study argues that community evaluations of speaker skills constitute a good reflection of local speaking conceptions, which are not always in line with linguists' speaker skills' evaluations, emphasizing the importance of the age factor in language competence.