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Status of Frisian? | ||
Tags: Frisian | The Netherlands | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Tyr Senior Member Sweden Joined 5781 days ago 316 posts - 384 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Swedish | Message 1 of 21 13 July 2010 at 12:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm not learning Frisian, I am however interested in it.
I'm wondering- is anyone here from the north Netherlands or at least has visited there? In the Eddie Izzard documentary where he went and spoke old English to the Frisian guy they made Frisian seem to be a all but dead language and they had to go out into the countryside to find this old guy speaking it. Looking at wikipedia on the other hand it seems rather vibrant and a decent sized minority language with half a million speakers and its used in schools and everything. Now. Wikipedia is well known for its horrible minority nationalists (just look to the Cornish pages for an example of how dumb it can get) so I'm taking this with a grain of salt but I am nonetheless intruiged. Howe is Frisian doing? Is it in anyway comparable to say Welsh in the UK? Or is it a dying language? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ulmo Diglot Newbie Joined 6085 days ago 20 posts - 22 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English | Message 2 of 21 13 July 2010 at 5:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I can't say a word about the liveness of the language. However, I do have a funny story related to Frisian. Once, in a second hand book store, in the foreign languages shelf, I found a book in a language somewhat similar to Dutch. Checking the cover and the inside, I found out it was Frisian, published in the late 90s. I was amazed, as I would never expect to find a book written in Frisian in Brazil.
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| BiaHuda Triglot Groupie Vietnam Joined 5362 days ago 97 posts - 127 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Vietnamese Studies: Cantonese | Message 3 of 21 13 July 2010 at 6:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Frisian is indeed a viable language, however; I couldn't tell you how many people speak it. The people of Frisland and Holland confirmed this during my travels there. English is almost universally spoken in the Netherlands and from what I understand both peoples often communicate with each other in English.
This has been my personal experience anyways. I spent a year in the Netherlands and wasn't even aware of the differences until before going there. At the most I would have expected the difference to be similiar those of Scotland and England. I was informed however; they are vastly different. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| stelingo Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5831 days ago 722 posts - 1076 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Czech, Polish, Greek, Mandarin | Message 4 of 21 14 July 2010 at 12:23am | IP Logged | |||||
Why would people from Friesland communicate with other Dutch people in English? This doesn't sound likely to me. 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6438 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 5 of 21 14 July 2010 at 12:52am | IP Logged | |||||
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I haven't visited the Netherlands, but I've met Frisian speakers (both native and non-native, all from the Netherlands) at Esperanto events. The language certainly seems to be alive and have speakers who are not elderly.
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| tracker465 Senior Member United States Joined 5351 days ago 355 posts - 496 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 6 of 21 14 July 2010 at 1:17am | IP Logged | |||||
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One of my Dutch friends from Rotterdam does not really appreciate the Frisian people or the language, and makes fun of it at every chance he gets. Since this is a reoccuring thing for him, I would conclude that there is some amount of presence of Frisian, despite the fact that it is not spoken by a large number of people.
I was also invited last fall to a Frisian event in NYC but was unable to go, due to a combination of health issues and my studies at the uni. This convention was also for the Dutch Frisian population. Regarding the Frisians in Germany, I ran into a few speakers in North Germany who spoke the North Frisian dialect. Although it was not overly difficult to find a few speakers, the language seems to be on the way out, only spoken by older people. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6010 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 7 of 21 14 July 2010 at 12:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
What do you mean "other Dutch people"? Frieslanders aren't Dutch, exactly as Scottish people aren't English. Holland is only one of the Netherlands. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Tyr Senior Member Sweden Joined 5781 days ago 316 posts - 384 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Swedish | Message 8 of 21 14 July 2010 at 1:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Dutch means of the Netherlands, not of Holland though.
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