Frisian: Forgotten Sister Language

Often touted as the closest relative to English, there isn't much solid information about Frisian out there. This video gives some background about it, especially Old Frisian, from the perspective of a linguist who works on related old Germanic languages.

[snorrebjorkson]

I speak Low German very well and also know Frisian and Scandinavian in addition to school English. What strikes me is that the more you include dialects and older forms, the less it is possible to recognize clear language boundaries within Germanic. They are probably only the result of later political developments. Frisian did not become its own national language, which is a shame. It acts like a link between Low German, English and Scandinavian.

[Frahamen]

As a native speaker of Dutch with some experience with Frisian, West Frisian, by far the most spoken variety of modern Frisian, I can say that in a historical sense Frisian might be closer to English, but in a practical sense bast on vocabulary and grammar, it's far more mutually ineligible for Dutch speakers than Anglophones.

[GrutteKlier]

Thank you Jackson! As being a Friesian myself and loving the language and speaking it every day, the current Friesian language doesn't sound as the old Friesian anymore. My introduction to old Friesian came from the old manuscript "Oera Linda" some say it's a fake manuscript but the story is really great!

[arwenwestrop]

Hi, back in the seventies a native Frisian friend of mine had invited some Scottish friends of hers to her home in Friesland. Her parents only spoke Friesian - with a tiny smattering of Dutch - and her friends spoke both English and Scottish - not the Gealic but Scottish. So my friend was concerned as to how her parents and her friends would communicate. That problem was solved in less than 5 minutes. The parents spoke Friesian, the Scottish friends spoke Scottish and they understood each other perfectly! My friend spoke Friesian, Dutch and English like native, so she could help out at the very occasional moments when parents and friends weren't quite sure they understood each other correctly, but those moment were rare and grew less as time went on. Fun!

[rienksjoerdsma]

I love that when you, History with Hilbert or anyone else talks about Frisian, a bunch of Frisians (including myself) just suddenly appear.

[demi]

There is an Old Frisian Summer School ever other year at Oxford, for those who are interested in studying it :)

[TheAntiburglar]

As an American living in Aberdeen in Scotland, I can confidently say that Scots is *definitely* worthy of being considered its own language. It's super cool, but I'll be damned if I can understand even a bit of it at normal speed lol

[LeoPlaw]

East Frisian is referred to as Plattdeutsch (flat German) in Germany. I've been told by people who grew up in that region, that people (pre-war generations) either side of the Dutch German border thought of themselves as Frisian first, and Dutch and German second, if at all.

[andreasstolcke]

About the -(e)r plural: it is also preserved in modern High German, e.g. Haus / Häuser, Land /Länder, but of course it is no longer productive and relatively infrequent among the several plural formation patterns in the language. It would be interesting to hear more about the development of plural forms across Germanic! Really enjoy your videos!

[psikodelriot]

Here in the north of Brandenburg (Germany), we still have our "markish accent".
It´s like an etymological Esperanto to gothic, norse, frisian, old english and others.
"Mark" means "border", wich was the border between nether and high german .

[DenStoreLaffen]

Faroese have a huge frisian part of their history that is often understated. It may explain some of their rampant innovation on skerping too

[benitoharrycollmann]

I recently watched a clip on YouTube, though i cant remember the source from which it was taken, where a Brit who speaks Old English went to the Netherlands and tried to communicate with a Dutchman speaking Frisian. Though they couldnt 100% understand one another, they understood enough of each others language for the Brit to purchase a brown cow from the Dutchman.

Thanks for another awesome video, Dr. Crawford! Always a good day when you upload

[morvil]

East Frisian didn’t switch to German but rather Low Saxon or Low German and is the area today where Low Saxon with an East Frisian substrate is the most vital in Germany, where intergenerational transmission still occurs, only after this Frisian to Low Saxon switch came the switch to Standard German in the latter half of the 20th century.

[hbowman]

I've heard the easiest language for an English speaker to learn (other, of course, than Scots and Tok Pisin, which are arguably dialects of English) is Afrikaans. The reason for this is that Dutch evolved in parallel with English in the medieval period because of rule by a French-speaking nobility and that the emergence of Afrikaans from Dutch resulted in an almost complete loss of inflections. Afrikaans has no grammatical gender, no declensions, no conjugations, and a simplified system of verb tenses which is almost entirely regular. Since it emerged, Afrikaans has had two centuries of heavy exposure to English and a large fraction of the modern speakers are bilingual in English.

[flightsoffancy]

Thank you for this. My Dutch grandmother, who came to the US from a town in Groeningen, spoke some Frisian but I haven't learned much about it till recently.

[alysmarcus]

wow - thankyou so much for this. my family up north spoke a couple of dialects that didn't 'quite fit' into the german i was taught in school - i will look for that book

[bombermanguy]

The majority of the west-coast in the Netherlands used to speak (old) Frisian or a related dialect. Dutch gradually replaced it as the medieval period went on, until it finally died out in the 17th century (the last place where it was spoken was north of Amsterdam in North-Holland). A lot of traces of this can be found in the traditional Dutch dialects of the area and placenames, especially in North-Holland (where there's even a region that is still called 'West-Friesland'). It's probably also how some North Sea Germanic traits got into standard Dutch. There's only some loose words and one known piece of text written in this Hollandic Frisian and it's apparently quite different from the Frisian that was spoken in the Friesland province at the time

[kimfleury]

I had asked about it because 40 years ago I read the autobiography of Charles Berlitz, of the famous "Language Family." They were known for being multi-lingual and teaching languages through the method they developed, known as "The Berlitz Method." For some reason, Charles mentioned the similarities between modern English and Frisian. He gave the exempt, "Good butter and good cheese is good English and good Fries."

[svenkaahedgerg]

Thank you for discussing the Frisian link. I started asking about this a couple of years ago when I searched for "the missing piece" between old Norse, Anglian, Saxon and old English

[Cruuzie]

Very interesting video! Scots really deserves its own video just like this one too.