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Frisian Language

Encyclopedia : F : FR : FRI : Frisian Language

Language classification
Indo-European languages
Germanic languages
West Germanic languages
Anglo-Frisian languages
Frisian languages

Frisian is a Germanic group of closely related languages, spoken by about 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. Frisian is the living language most closely related to the English language family.

Contents

Division

Sign in Frisian in Nordstrand: You're driving now through the New Koog.
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Sign in Frisian in Nordstrand: You're driving now through the New Koog.

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. Stadsfries is a mixed language.

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 have long protected Frisian speech there from pressure by the surrounding Low German and standard German.

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 Helgoland. 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 in the Netherlands, together with Dutch. ISO 639-1 code fy and ISO 639-2 code fry were assigned to the collective Frisian languages, but are as of 2006 used only for West Frisian.

The new ISO 639 code frs is used for the Saterland Frisian language also known as Eastern Frisian, but not to be confused with East Frisian. The new ISO 639 code frr is used for the North Frisian language variants spoken in parts of Schleswig-Holstein.

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 or Frisia Magna, and many of the areas within it still treasure their Frisian heritage, even though in most places the Frisian languages have been lost.

Originally, Frisian was the language most closely related to English, but after at least five hundred years of being subjected to the influence of Dutch, modern Frisian bears a greater similarity to Dutch than to English; one must also 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 which Low Franconian languages (such as Dutch) and 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 only affected the other West Germanic varieties slightly, if at all. 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 rhyme demonstrates the palpable similarity between Frisian and English: "Butter, bread and green cheese is good English and good Friese," which is pronounced more or less the same in both languages (Frisian: "Bûter, brea en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk.")

One major difference between Old Frisian and modern Frisian is that in the Old Frisian period (c.1150-c.1550) grammatical cases still existed. 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. Generally, all these texts are restricted to legalistic writings. Although the earliest definite written examples of Frisian are from approximately the 9th century, there are a few examples of runic inscriptions from the region which 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. 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

Up until the fifteenth century Frisian was a language widely spoken and written, but from 1500 onwards it became an almost exclusively oral language, mainly used in rural areas. This was in part due to 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 its 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 Japiks (1603-66), a schoolteacher and cantor from the city of Bolsward (Boalsert), who largely fathered modern Frisian literature and orthography, was really an exception 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 Modern Frisian period is considered to have begun at this point in time, around 1820.

Family tree

Linguistic map showing spread of Frisian language
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Linguistic map showing spread of Frisian language

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

See also

External links

Wikipedia
[West Frisian language edition] of Wikipedia

Germanic languages
Afrikaans | Danish | Dutch | English | Faroese | Frisian |
German | Icelandic | Norwegian | Scots | Swedish | Wymysojer | Yiddish

 

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