Was Ginny Weasley a Parselmouth?

Question

Tom Riddle used Ginny Weasley to open the Chamber of Secrets, which requires the ability to speak Parseltongue.

Ginny must have spoken Parseltongue to open the chamber -- does this qualify Ginny as a Parselmouth?

Answer 1

No, absolutely not.

• Ginny was under Voldemort's possession each time she opened the chamber.
• He was using her as a meat puppet
• It's Voldemort that can speak Parseltongue, not her.

‘Yes,’ said Riddle, calmly. ‘Of course, she didn’t know what she was doing at first. It was very amusing. I wish you could have seen her new diary entries … far more interesting, they became … Dear Tom,’ he recited, watching Harry’s horrified face, ‘I think I’m losing my memory. There are rooster feathers all over my robes and I don’t know how they got there" _{^{Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets}}

and

‘Well, can you remember everything you’ve been doing?’ Ginny asked. ‘Are there big blank periods where you don’t know what you’ve been up to?’

Harry racked his brains. ‘No,’ he said.

‘Then You-Know-Who hasn’t ever possessed you,’ said Ginny simply. ‘When he did it to me, I couldn’t remember what I’d been doing for hours at a time. I’d find myself somewhere and not know how I got there.’
_{^{Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix}}

---

Out of universe, JKR specifically spoke to this issue in a 2005 interview;

MA: Someone put it to me last night, that if Ginny, with the diary...

JKR: Harry definitely destroyed that piece of soul, you saw it take shape, you saw it destroyed, it’s gone. And Ginny is definitely in no way possessed by Voldemort.

MA: Is she still a Parselmouth?

JKR: No.

Note also that given that since Harry loses his ability to speak Parseltongue after he destroys the horcrux fragment, there's a pretty fair argument to be made that the only true (living) Parselmouth in the Harry Potter series is Voldemort himself.

Answer 2

I would say no.

In a Leaky Cauldron interview in 2005, JK Rowling confirmed that Ginny definitely lost any ability she had to speak Parseltongue when the diary was destroyed:

MA: Someone put it to me last night, that if Ginny, with the diary—

JKR: Harry definitely destroyed that piece of soul, you saw it take shape, you saw it destroyed, it’s gone. And Ginny is definitely in no way possessed by Voldemort.

MA: Is she still a Parselmouth?

JKR: No.

^{“The Leaky Cauldron and Mugglenet interview Joanne Kathleen Rowling: Part Three,” The Leaky Cauldron, 16 July 2005}

(The word “still” might imply that she would have been a Parselmouth while under Voldemort’s influence, but that was the Melissa Anelli’s words, not Rowling’s, and I can’t find any ref for that.)

I think Ginny’s use of Parseltongue is more comparable to Ron’s: since she was being possessed by Voldemort, the understanding of the language came from him, not her. At best, she was making sounds that happened to resemble Parseltongue, but Ginny herself never understood them.

And if I quote you in an answer to a previous Parseltongue question:

You have to be able to speak Parseltongue in order to be a bona fide Parselmouth.

Ginny has never shown any ability to speak Parseltongue when not being possessed by Voldemort, so I’d say that he’s the Parselmouth, not her.