Grammatical borrowing and language change: The Dutchification of Frisian

Abstract

Abstract A scientific discipline is defined by a set of research objectives, and a set of methodological principles, the latter in part derived from a metatheoretical worldview. From this perspective the study of minority languages as a coherent domain of research hardly exists. It seems to be more accurate to say that minority languages are approached from (a combination of) traditional disciplines such as sociology, psychology and linguistics. What these approaches share, is, may be, no more than their research objects. This makes it unavoidable, in my opinion, to discuss the theme of ‘comparative research and development of theories’ from the perspective of one or more of the disciplines just mentioned. My starting point will be linguistics, and more specifically, generative grammar. From a grammatical point of view, minority languages have, as natural languages, no special properties. Nevertheless these languages are of particular interest for the grammarian; more specifically, for the grammarian who is interested in the dynamics of natural language. The speakers of minority languages find themselves in a situation which puts all kinds of pressure on the use of its minority mother tongue. Changes occur within a reasonably short period of time. Minority languages are therefore well qualified for studying factors that are involved in language change. In this paper I would like to address the very old problem of grammatical borrowing. I will discuss this problem within the context of minority language studies. Is it possible that the grammatical system of a minority language changes by borrowing grammatical elements and/or grammatical principles from the dominant language? It seems to be natural to take the Dutchification of Frisian as an example. Three cases of grammatical borrowing of Frisian from Dutch that have been proposed in the literature will be critically discussed: 1. the borrowing of verbal endings that is supposed to be responsible for transition of verbs from the je class to the e class;2. the transition of the diminutive suffix ke to tsje; 3. changes in the word order of the Frisian verbal complex. I will conclude that the grammatical system of Frisian does not Dutchify. Furthermore this examination gives rise to some general conclusions concerning the ways in which minority languages can and cannot be influenced by dominant languages.