Characteristics

The following remarks refer to the more or less standard West Frisian that is developing in the province of Friesland.

Frisian has the following system of consonants, given here in the usual spellings: stops, p, b, t, d, k, g; fricatives, f, v, s, z, ch, g; nasals, m, n, ng; liquids, l, r; and glides, w, h, j. Examples (given here in part to show the close relationship between Frisian and English) include p, t, and k(unaspirated) in peal ‘pole,’ twa ‘two,’ and kat ‘cat’; b, d, and the stop symbolized by the letter gin boi ‘boy,’ dei ‘day,’ and goed ‘good’; f, s, and ch in fiif ‘five,’ seis ‘six,’ and acht ‘eight’; v, z, and the fricative symbolized by the letter g in tolve ‘twelve,’ tûzen ‘thousand,’ and wegen ‘ways’; m, n, and ng in miel ‘meal,’ need ‘need,’ and ring ‘ring’; l and r in laem ‘lamb’ and reep ‘rope’; w, h, and j in wy ‘we,’ hy ‘he,’ and jo ‘you.’ As the final letter of a word, voiced b, d, z, and g are generally unvoiced to p, t, s, and ch.

Dialects

The Frisian dialects of the Netherlands province of Friesland are, with three exceptions, relatively uniform, though it is customary to make a distinction between Wouden Frisian in the east, Klei Frisian in the west (the variety on which standard Frisian is largely based), and Southwest Corner Frisian in the southwest. The three exceptions are the island dialect of East and West Terschelling and the dialects of the city of Hindeloopen and of the island of Schiermonnikoog. These latter two differ so greatly that they are not intelligible to other speakers of West Frisian and are both dying out. Quite different from any of these is the so-called City Frisian (Stedfrysk, or Stedsk) spoken in the cities of Leeuwarden, Franeker, Harlingen, Bolsward, Sneek, Staveren, and Dokkum. Despite the name, this is not Frisian at all but a variety of Dutch strongly influenced by Frisian. Similar in nature are the dialects of Heerenveen and Kollum, of the middle section of the island of Terschelling, and of Het Bildt (a coastal area northwest of Leeuwarden, diked in and settled by Hollanders during the 16th century).

East Frisian survives today only in the German Saterland, consisting of the three parishes of Ramsloh, Strücklingen, and Scharrel, each with a slightly different dialect. The area to the north is called East Frisia (German Ostfriesland), and the local dialect East Frisian (German Ostfriesisch), although it is actually not Frisian but the local variety of Low German.

Though North Frisian is spoken in only a small geographic area by only some 8,000 persons, it exists in an extraordinary number of local dialects, some of which are mutually unintelligible. Because of this, it would be almost impossible to develop a single standard North Frisian that could be used throughout this area. North Frisian dialects are customarily divided into Insular North Frisian (Sylt, Föhr-Amrum, Helgoland) and Continental North Frisian (the Halligen Islands and the coast of Schleswig), the latter in seven main varieties and further subvarieties. Because this linguistic area long bordered on Danish, it was extensively influenced by the neighbouring Danish dialects. In more recent times it has been heavily influenced by German, both standard German and the neighbouring Low German dialects. Today all speakers of North Frisian are bilingual or trilingual; all learn Frisian at home and standard German in school, and many also learn dialectal Low German.

Dutch (Netherlandic, Flemish)

Dutch, formally called Netherlandic, is the national language of the Netherlands and with French is a national language of Belgium. Popular English usage applies the term Dutch to the language of the Netherlands and the term Flemish to the language of Belgium, but in fact they are one and the same standard language. In its various forms, standard and dialectal, Dutch is the indigenous language of most of the Netherlands (all but the Frisian-speaking province of Friesland), of northern Belgium, and of a small part of France immediately to the west of Belgium. It also is used in islands of the former Netherlands Antilles and in Suriname, a former Dutch dependency. A derivative of Dutch, Afrikaans, is one of the national languages of South Africa.

As a written language, Dutch is quite uniform; it differs in the Netherlands and Belgium no more than written English does in the United States and Great Britain. As a spoken language, however, it exists in far more varieties than does the English of North America. At one extreme is Standard Dutch (Algemeen Beschaafd Nederlands, ‘General Cultured Netherlandic’), which is used for public and official purposes and is the language of instruction in schools and universities. It is everywhere quite uniform, though speakers usually show by their accents the general area from which they come. At the other extreme are the local dialects, used among family and friends and with others from the same region.