Back Fries Afrikaans Friesische Sprache ALS Idioma frisón AN Fresisc sprǣc ANG फ्रीसियाई भाषा सिनी ANP اللغة الفريزية Arabic Frisón AST Friz dilləri Azerbaijani فریس دیللری AZB Friesische Sprochn BAR
| Frisian | |
|---|---|
| West Frisian: Frysk Saterland Frisian: Fräisk North Frisian: Friisk, fresk, freesk, frasch, fräisch, freesch | |
| Geographic distribution | Netherlands and Germany. West Frisian: Friesland, Westerkwartier; Saterland Frisian: Saterland; North Frisian: Nordfriesland, Heligoland |
| Ethnicity | Frisians |
| Linguistic classification | Indo-European |
Early forms | |
| Subdivisions |
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| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | – |
| Linguasphere | 52-ACA |
| Glottolog | fris1239 |
 Present-day distribution of the Frisian languages in Europe:
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The Frisian languages (/ˈfriːʒən/ FREE-zhən[1] or /ˈfrɪziən/ FRIZ-ee-ən[2]) are a closely related group of West Germanic languages, spoken by about 400,000 Frisian people, who live on the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands and Germany. The Frisian languages are the closest living language group to the Anglic languages; the two groups make up the Anglo-Frisian languages group and together with the Low German dialects these form the North Sea Germanic languages. However the close genetic relationship between English and Frisian is not reflected in the linguistic distances between the modern languages, which are not mutually intelligible. Geographical and historical circumstances have caused the two languages to drift apart linguistically.[3]
There are three different branches of Frisian, which are usually called Frisian languages, despite the fact that dialects within those branches may not be mutually intelligible.[4] West Frisian is by far the most spoken of the three and is an official language in the Dutch province of Friesland, where it is spoken on the mainland and on two of the West Frisian Islands: Terschelling and Schiermonnikoog. It is also spoken in four villages in the Westerkwartier of the neighbouring province of Groningen. North Frisian, the second branch, is spoken in the northernmost German district of Nordfriesland in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, on the North Frisian mainland, and on the North Frisian Islands of Sylt, Föhr, Amrum, and the Halligs. It is also spoken on the islands of Heligoland (deät Lun) and Düne (de Halem) in the North Sea. The third Frisian branch, East Frisian, has only one remaining variant, Sater Frisian, spoken in the municipality of Saterland in the Lower Saxon district of Cloppenburg. Surrounded by bogs, the four Saterlandic villages lie just outside the borders of East Frisia, in the Oldenburg Münsterland region. In East Frisia proper, East Frisian Low Saxon is spoken today, which is not a Frisian language, but a variant of Low German/Low Saxon.
For many centuries Frisian has been under the strong influence from Dutch and the Frisian and Dutch language areas share a long common history, which is why Dutch is the Germanic language most similar to Frisian, despite Frisian being genealogically closer to English and Scots.[3] The degree of mutual intelligibility between Frisian and Dutch is debated, with a 2005 cloze test, in which a portion of text is masked and the participant is asked to fill in the masked portion of text, showing that Dutch respondents scored 31.9% when presented with a (West) Frisian text,[5] whereas researchers in 2012 concluded that the linguistic distance between Dutch and the Frisian dialects were slightly smaller than the distances between the Scandinavian languages, which are known to be largely mutually intelligible.[3]
- ^ Laurie Bauer, 2007, The Linguistics Student’s Handbook, Edinburgh
- ^ "Frisian". Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). Oxford University Press. (Subscription or participating institution membership required.)
- ^ a b c Charlotte Gooskens & Wilbert Heeringa: The Position of Frisian in the Germanic Language Area, 2012, pp 21-22.
- ^ Swarte, Femke; Hilton, Nanna Haug (2013). "Mutual intelligibility between speakers of North and West Frisian". Phonetics in Europe: Perception and Production: 281–302.
- ^ Bezooijen, Renée van; Gooskens, Charlotte (2005). "How easy is it for speakers of Dutch to understand Frisian and Afrikaans, and why?" (PDF). Linguistics in the Netherlands. 22: 18, 21, 22.
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