Frisian

Where it’s spoken

West Frisian (Frysk) is spoken in the Dutch province of Friesland by about 400,000 people, with co-official status alongside Dutch. North Frisian (about 10,000 speakers) is spoken on the German North Sea coast and islands. East Frisian (Saterlandic, only a few thousand speakers) survives in the German Saterland. Each of the three Frisian languages has substantial internal dialect variation.

What it sounds like

Frisian preserves Old English-like vowel patterns: where English has “tree,” “cheese,” “key,” Frisian often has cognate words with similar vowels (beam, tsiis, kaai). Phonemic vowel length, diphthongs, and breaking vowels (where a vowel splits into two parts before certain consonants) are notable features. Standard West Frisian has 14 vowels.

How it’s written

West Frisian uses 32 Latin letters with diacritics including diaeresis (ä, ö, ü) and circumflex (â, ê, î, ô, û). The orthography was officially codified in the 1980s. North Frisian uses several local orthographies for each dialect.

History

Old Frisian (8th–16th centuries) is the closest historical relative of Old English — together they form the Anglo-Frisian group. After centuries of Dutch dominance, the 1956 Frisian Language Movement and 1980s legislation gave West Frisian official protection.