‘Kinsto it Frysk ferstean?’

Sara Pinho,Guillem Belmar

doi:10.1075/dujal.19034.bel

Abstract

AbstractWest Frisian is a minoritized language spoken in the province of Fryslân, in the Netherlands. It has been said to be converging with Standard Dutch (seeDe Haan, 1997;Nerbonne, 2001), and it has been found to be largely intelligible for speakers of regional language varieties in the Netherlands, such as Low Saxon or Limburgish for example (see, for instance,De Vries, 2010).In this research, we tested how much Frisian native speakers of Dutch can actually understand, as well as the degree of difficulty of each type of task. An online test was designed (N = 225) to measure the intelligibility of both written and spoken Frisian. The results seem to indicate that West Frisian is highly intelligible for Dutch native speakers, which we argue should be used to enrich the school curriculum and foster receptive skills in the minoritized language (seeFonseca, 2012;Belmar, 2019b), which could in turn boost its use.

Highlights

Mastering a language other than our mother tongue is, for most of us, a high cost time and effort investment
The present study investigates the intelligibility of West Frisian for Dutch native speakers, both in written and in spoken forms
The results of this study give us more insight into the possibilities of using intercomprehension between Frisian and Dutch speakers for revitalization purposes

Summary

Introduction

Mastering a language other than our mother tongue is, for most of us, a high cost time and effort investment. When two closely related languages are similar enough in terms of grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation, speakers of one language can understand the other without learning it They are, able to communicate using two different languages and without the need of a lingua franca. The study of intelligibility of closely related languages was first used to study the Algonquian dialect continuum (see Pierce, 1952), and was followed by research looking into the possibility to communicate across similar languages (e.g., Jensen, 1989 on the intelligibility of Portuguese and Spanish)

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Results

Conclusion