Frisian languages are a closely related group of
Germanic languages, spoken by about half a million members of
Frisian ethnic groups, who live on the southern fringes of the
North Sea in the
Netherlands and
Germany. Frisian languages are the most closely related living European languages to
Old English, but modern English and Frisian are mostly unintelligible to each other. It has been asserted that fishermen from
Great Yarmouth could understand fishers from
Harlingen in Friesland. There are similarities to both
Dutch, as many Frisian words are borrowed from Dutch, and Danish, as
Danish speakers are able to understand some spoken Frisian. Additional shared linguistic characteristics between the Great Yarmouth area, Friesland, and Denmark are likely to have resulted from the close trading relationship these areas maintained during the centuries-long
Hanseatic League of the
Late Middle Ages.
Division
There are three varieties of Frisian:
West 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, the North Frisian language especially is further segmented into several strongly diverse dialects.
Stadsfries is a
mixed language (West Frisian mixed with
Dutch). Frisian is called
Frysk in West Frisian,
Fräisch in Saterland Frisian, and
Frasch,
Fresk,
Freesk, and
Friisk in the dialects of North Frisian.
The situation in the Dutch province of Groningen is more complex: The local Low Saxon dialect of
Gronings is a mixture of Frisian and Low Saxon dialects, though it's believed that Frisian was spoken here at one time and has been gradually replaced by the town language of Groningen City, which in turn is now being replaced by standard Dutch.
Speakers
Most Frisian speakers live in the
Netherlands, primarily in the province of
Friesland, since 1997 officially using its West Frisian name of Fryslân, 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 Saterland 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 (
North Frisia) region of the German province of
Schleswig-Holstein, there are 10,000 North 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 North Frisian dialects are still in use.
Status
Saterland and North Frisian are officially recognised and protected as
minority languages in Germany, and West Frisian 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 isn't to be confused with
East Frisian Low Saxon, a
West Low German dialect.
The new
ISO 639 code
frr is used for the
North Frisian language variants spoken in parts of
Schleswig-Holstein.
Saterland Frisian and most dialects of North Frisian are seriously endangered.
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.
Frisian is the language most closely related to
English apart from
Scots, but after at least five hundred years of being subjected to the influence of
Dutch, modern Frisian in some aspects 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 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. Monolingual English-speakers newly exposed to the language wouldn't only not understand it at all, except for some simple sentences, but would likely mistake it for Dutch, or possibly Norwegian.
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's
kaas and
kerk, whereas in German the respective words are
Käse and
Kirche. Contrarily, this didn't happen for
chin and (to)
choose, which are
kin and
kieze (External Link
).
One rhyme demonstrates the palpable similarity between Frisian and English: "Butter, bread, and green cheese is good English and good Fries," 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 don't amount to more than single- or few-word inscriptions, and can't 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 didn't 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, who largely fathered modern Frisian literature and orthography, was really an exception to the rule.
His example wasn't 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 Southwest Frisian. Therefore, the Modern Frisian period is considered to have begun at this point in time, around 1820.
Family tree
Each of the Frisian 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.
It is interesting to identify a migration from German to English via Dutch and Frisian:
zurück (German) -> terug (Dutch) -> tebek (Frisian) -> back (English);
Schafe (German) -> schapen (Dutch) -> skiep (Frisian) -> sheep (English).
It is interesting that the plural of
sheep in Frisian and English (and also several German dialects) is identical to the singular form.
Text sample
The Lord's Prayer
The Lord's Prayer in Standard Western Frisian or Frysk:
» Us Heit, dy't yn de himelen is
jins namme wurde hillige.
» Jins keninkryk komme.
Jins wollen barre,
» allyk yn 'e himel
sa ek op ierde.
» Jou ús hjoed ús deistich brea.
En ferjou ús ús skulden,
» allyk ek wy ferjouwe ús skuldners.
En lied ús net yn fersiking,
» mar ferlos ús fan 'e kweade.
[WantJowes is it keninkryk en de krêft
» en de hearlikheid oant yn ivichheid.]
Amen.
The
English translation in the 1662 Anglican
Book of Common Prayer:
» Our Father, which art in Heaven
Hallowed be thy Name.
» Thy Kingdom come.
Thy will be done,
» in earth as it's in Heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
» And forgive us our trespasses,
As we forgive them that trespass against us.
» And lead us not into temptation;
But deliver us from evil.
» [Forthine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory,
For ever and ever.]
Amen.
(
NB:
Which was changed to "who",
in earth to "on earth," and
them to "those" in the 1928 version of the Church of England prayer book and used in other later Anglican prayer books too. However, the words given here are those of the original 1662 book as stated)
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