Frisian languages

This page covers the Frisian language or languages, as spoken in the North of The Netherlands and Germany.

error: ISO 639 code is required (help) Frisian is a Germanic language, or group of closely related languages, spoken by around half a million members of an ethnic group living on the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands and Germany. The ancient Frisians figured prominently in North European history. They were especially noted as traders and raiders during the Viking Age.

Division

There are three varieties of Frisian: West Lauwers Frisian, Saterland Frisian, and North Frisian. Some linguists consider these three varieties, despite their mutual unintelligibility, to be dialects of one single Frisian language, while others consider them to be three separate languages, as do their speakers. Of the three, especially the North Frisian language is further segmented into several strongly diverse dialects.

West Lauwers Frisian

Speakers

Most Frisian speakers live in the Netherlands, primarily in the province of Fryslân, since 1997 officially using its Frisian name, where the number of native speakers is about 350,000. An increasing number of Dutch native speakers in the province of Friesland are able to speak the language. In Germany, there are about 2,000 speakers of Frisian in the Saterland region of Lower Saxony, the Saterland's marshy fringe areas having long protected Frisian speech there from pressure by the surrounding Low German and High German languages.

In the Nordfriesland (Northern Frisia) region of the German province of Schleswig-Holstein, there are 10,000 Frisian speakers. While many of these Frisians live on the mainland, most are found on the islands, notably Sylt, Föhr, Amrum, and Heligoland. The local corresponding Frisian dialects are still in use.

Status

Frisian is officially recognised and protected as a minority language in Germany and is one of the two official languages of the Netherlands. ISO 639 codes 'fy' and 'fry' were assigned to the collective Frisian languages.

History

Old Frisian

In the early Middle Ages the Frisian lands stretched from the area around Bruges, in what is now Belgium, to the river Weser, in northern Germany. At that time, the Frisian language was spoken along the entire southern North Sea coast. Today this region is sometimes referred to as Great Frisia of Frisia Magna, and many of the areas within it still treasure their Frisian hertitage, even though in most places the Frisian languages has been lost.

Originally, Frisian was the language closest related to English, but after at least five hundred years of being subjected to the influence of Dutch it is obvious to most observers that nowadays it bears a greater similarity to Dutch than to English. Also, one has to take into account the centuries long drift of English away from Frisian. Thus the modern languages are unintelligible to each other today, partly due to the marks Low Franconian languages (such as Dutch) and Low Saxon/Low German have left on Frisian and partly due to the vast influence some languages, in particular French, have had on English throughout the centuries.

Old Frisian, however, did bear a striking similarity to Old English. This similarity was reinforced in the late Middle Ages by the Ingaevonic sound shift, which affected Frisian and English, but not or hardly the other West Germanic varieties. Historically, both English and Frisian are marked by the suppression of the Germanic nasal in a word like us (ús), soft (sêft) or goose (goes): see Anglo-Frisian nasal spirant law. Also, when followed by some vowels the Germanic k softened to a ch sound. For example, the Frisian for cheese and church is tsiis and tsjerke, whereas in Dutch it is kaas and kerk.

One major difference between Old Frisian and modern Frisian is that in the Old Frisian period (c.1150-c.1550) grammatical cases still occurred. Some of the texts that are preserved from this period are from the twelfth or thirteenth, but most are from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The transition from the Old Frisian to the Middle Frisian period (c.1550-c.1820) in the sixteenth century, is based on the fairly abrupt halt in the use of Frisian as a written language.

Middle Frisian and New Frisian

Up until the fifteenth century Frisian was a language widely spoken and written, but from 1500 onwards it became an almost exclusively oreal language, mainly used in rural areas. This was in part due tot the occupation of its stronghold, the Dutch province of Friesland (Fryslân), in 1498, by Duke Albert of Saxony, who replaced Frisian as the language of government with Dutch.

Afterwards this practice was continued under the Habsburg rulers of the Netherlands (the German Emperor Charles V and his son, the Spanish King Philip II), and even when the Netherlands became independent, in 1585, Frisian did not regain it former status. The reason for this was the rise of Holland as the dominant part of the Netherlands and its language, Dutch, as the dominant language in judicial, administrative and religious affairs.

In this period the great Frisian poet Gysbert Japix (1603-66), a schoolteacher and cantor from the city of Bolsward (Boalsert), who largely fathered modern Frisian literature and orthography, was really an acception to the rule.

His example was not followed until the nineteenth century, when entire generations of Frisian authors and poets appeared. This coincided with the introduction of the so-called newer breaking system, a prominent grammatical feature in almost all West Frisian dialects, with the notable exception of Súdwesthoeksk. Therefore, the New Frisian period is considered to have begun at this point in time, around 1820.

Written Frisian

The earliest definite written examples of Frisian are from approximately the 9th century. A few examples of runic inscriptions from the region are probably older and possibly in the Frisian language. These runic writings however usually do not amount to more than single- or few-word inscriptions, and cannot be said to constitute literature as such. Actual Frisian writings appear a few centuries later, and are generally restricted to legalistic writings — this the Old Frisian period.

Family tree

Each of the languages has several dialects. Between some, the differences are such that they rarely hamper understanding, there just the number of speakers justifies the denominator of 'dialect', in other cases, even neighbouring dialects may hardly be mutually intelligible.

West Frisian language, spoken in the Netherlands.
East Frisian language, spoken in Lower Saxony, Germany.
- Saterlandic
- Several extinct dialects
North Frisian language, spoken in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany.
- Mainland dialects
  - Dialect of Mooring
  - Dialect of Hoorning
  - Dialect of Wiedingharde
  - Dialect of Tideland Islands
- Island dialects
  - Dialect of Sylt
  - Dialect of Föhr
  - Dialect of Amrum
- Heligolandic

External links