Middle Frisian evolved from Old Frisian from the 16th century and was spoken until c. 1820, considered the beginning of the Modern period of the Frisian languages.
Up until the 15th century Old Frisian was a language widely spoken and written in what are now the northern Netherlands and north-western Germany, but from 1500 onwards it became an almost exclusively oral language, mainly used in rural areas. This was in part due to the occupation of its stronghold, the Dutch province of Friesland (Fryslân), in 1498 – when Duke Albert III, Duke of Saxony, replaced Frisian as the language of government with Dutch. As late as 1599, the London dramatist Thomas Dekker could introduce whole scenes in the mixed Frisian-Dutch argot of the coast in The Shoemaker's Holiday, in confidence that his English-speaking audience could follow it.[1]
Afterwards this practice was continued under the Habsburg rulers of the Netherlands (the German Emperor Charles V and his son, the Spanish King Philip II), and even when the Netherlands became independent, in 1585, Frisian did not regain its former status. The reason for this was the rise of Holland as the dominant part of the Netherlands, and its language, Dutch, as the dominant language in judicial, administrative and religious affairs.
In this period the great Frisian poet Gysbert Japix (1603–1666), a schoolmaster and cantor from the city of Boalsert, seen as the father of modern West Frisian literature and spelling, was an exception to the trend. His example was not followed until the 19th century, when new generations of West Frisian authors and poets appeared.
This coincided with the introduction of the so-called newer breaking system, a prominent grammatical feature in almost all West Frisian dialects, with the notable exception of Súdwesthoeksk. Therefore, the Modern Frisian period is considered to have begun at this point in time, around 1820.
The Frisian languages are a closely related group of West Germanic languages, spoken by about 500,000 Frisian people, who live on the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands and Germany. The Frisian languages are the closest living language group to the Anglic languages; the two groups make up the Anglo-Frisian languages group and together with the Low German dialects these form the North Sea Germanic languages. However, modern English and Frisian are not mutually intelligible, nor are Frisian languages intelligible among themselves, owing to independent linguistic innovations and foreign influences.
The Frisians are an ethnic group indigenous to the coastal regions of the Netherlands and northwestern Germany. They inhabit an area known as Frisia and are concentrated in the Dutch provinces of Friesland and Groningen and, in Germany, East Frisia and North Frisia. The name is probably derived from frisselje. The Frisian languages are spoken by more than 500,000 people; West Frisian is officially recognised in the Netherlands, and North Frisian and Saterland Frisian are recognised as regional languages in Germany.
The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, English, is also the world's most widely spoken language with an estimated 2 billion speakers. All Germanic languages are derived from Proto-Germanic, spoken in Iron Age Scandinavia.
Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It developed from the languages brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th century, and the first Old English literary works date from the mid-7th century. After the Norman conquest of 1066, English was replaced, for a time, by Anglo-Norman as the language of the upper classes. This is regarded as marking the end of the Old English era, since during this period the English language was heavily influenced by Anglo-Norman, developing into a phase known now as Middle English in England and Early Scots in Scotland.
Frisia is a cross-border cultural region in Northwestern Europe. Stretching along the Wadden Sea, it encompasses the north of the Netherlands and parts of northwestern Germany. The region is traditionally inhabited by the Frisians, a West Germanic ethnic group.
English is a West Germanic language that originated from Ingvaeonic languages brought to Britain in the mid-5th to 7th centuries AD by Anglo-Saxon migrants from what is now northwest Germany, southern Denmark and the Netherlands. The Anglo-Saxons settled in the British Isles from the mid-5th century and came to dominate the bulk of southern Great Britain. Their language originated as a group of Ingvaeonic languages which were spoken by the settlers in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages, displacing the Celtic languages that had previously been dominant. Old English reflected the varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms established in different parts of Britain. The Late West Saxon dialect eventually became dominant. A significant subsequent influence on the shaping of Old English came from contact with the North Germanic languages spoken by the Scandinavian Vikings who conquered and colonized parts of Britain during the 8th and 9th centuries, which led to much lexical borrowing and grammatical simplification. The Anglian dialects had a greater influence on Middle English.
Stadsfries or Town Frisian is a set of dialects spoken in certain cities in the province of Friesland in the northern Netherlands, namely Leeuwarden, Sneek, Bolsward, Franeker, Dokkum, Harlingen, Stavoren, and to some extent in Heerenveen. For linguistic reasons, the outlying and insular dialects of Midsland (Terschelling), Ameland, Het Bildt, and Kollum are also sometimes tied to Stadsfries.
West Frisian, or simply Frisian, is a West Germanic language spoken mostly in the province of Friesland in the north of the Netherlands, mostly by those of Frisian ancestry. It is the most widely spoken of the Frisian languages.
Old Saxon, also known as Old Low German, was a Germanic language and the earliest recorded form of Low German. It is a West Germanic language, closely related to the Anglo-Frisian languages. It is documented from the 8th century until the 12th century, when it gradually evolved into Middle Low German. It was spoken throughout modern northwestern Germany, primarily in the coastal regions and in the eastern Netherlands by Saxons, a Germanic tribe that inhabited the region of Saxony. It partially shares Anglo-Frisian's Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law which sets it apart from Low Franconian and Irminonic languages, such as Dutch, Luxembourgish and German.
The Dutch are an ethnic group native to the Netherlands. They share a common ancestry and culture and speak the Dutch language. Dutch people and their descendants are found in migrant communities worldwide, notably in Aruba, Suriname, Guyana, Curaçao, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand and the United States. The Low Countries were situated around the border of France and the Holy Roman Empire, forming a part of their respective peripheries and the various territories of which they consisted had become virtually autonomous by the 13th century. Under the Habsburgs, the Netherlands were organised into a single administrative unit, and in the 16th and 17th centuries the Northern Netherlands gained independence from Spain as the Dutch Republic. The high degree of urbanization characteristic of Dutch society was attained at a relatively early date. During the Republic the first series of large-scale Dutch migrations outside of Europe took place.
The Anglo-Frisian languages are the Anglic and Frisian varieties of the West Germanic languages.
Theodiscus was a term used in the early Middle Ages to refer to the West Germanic languages. The Latin term was borrowed from the Germanic adjective meaning "of the people" but, unlike it, was used only to refer to languages. In Medieval Western Europe non-native Latin was the language of science, church and administration, hence Latin theodiscus and its Germanic counterparts were used as antonyms of Latin, to refer to the "native language spoken by the general populace". They were subsequently used in the Frankish Empire to denote the native Germanic vernaculars. As such, they were no longer used as antonym of Latin, but of walhisk, a language descendant from Latin, but nevertheless the speech of the general populace as well. In doing so Latin theodiscus and the Germanic reflexes of *þiudiskaz effectively obtained the meaning of "Germanic", or more specifically one of its local varieties – resulting in the English exonym "Dutch", the German endonym Deutsch, the modern Dutch word for "German", Duits, and the obsolete or poetic Dutch word for Dutch and its dialects such as Diets. In Romance languages the same word yielded the Italian word for "German", tedesco, and the old French word used for Dutch or, depending on the locality, German speakers, tiois.
The appearance of the German language begins in the Early Middle Ages with the High German consonant shift. Old High German, Middle High German, and Early New High German span the duration of the Holy Roman Empire. The 19th and 20th centuries saw the rise of Standard German and a decrease of dialectal variety.
Dutch is a West Germanic language, that originated from the Old Frankish dialects.
The Low Countries comprise the coastal Rhine–Meuse–Scheldt delta region in Western Europe, whose definition usually includes the modern countries of Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands. Both Belgium and the Netherlands derived their names from earlier names for the region, due to nether meaning "low" and Belgica being the Latinized name for all the Low Countries, a nomenclature that became obsolete after Belgium's secession in 1830.
In linguistics, Old Dutch or Old Low Franconian is the set of Franconian dialects spoken in the Low Countries during the Early Middle Ages, from around the 6th or 8th to the 12th century. Old Dutch is mostly recorded on fragmentary relics, and words have been reconstructed from Middle Dutch and Old Dutch loanwords in French.
Dutch dialects are primarily the dialects that are both cognate with the Dutch language and spoken in the same language area as the Dutch standard language. They are remarkably diverse and are found within Europe mainly in the Netherlands and northern Belgium.
Dutch, also known as Netherlandic or Netherlandish, is a West Germanic language spoken by about 25 million people as a first language and 5 million as a second language. It is the third most widely spoken Germanic language, after its close relatives German and English. Afrikaans is a separate but somewhat mutually intelligible daughter language spoken, to some degree, by at least 16 million people, mainly in South Africa and Namibia, evolving from the Cape Dutch dialects of Southern Africa. The dialects used in Belgium and in Suriname, meanwhile, are all guided by the Dutch Language Union.
The Anglo-Saxon settlement in the Netherlands was a movement of continental Angles, Saxons, Franks and possibly English Anglo-Saxons into the lands formerly inhabited by the ancient Frisii, Cananefates and Batavians. These migrations occurred after the population drop of the Frisii during the 5th century up until the 7th century. These new migrants from northwestern Germany were later referred to as the Frisians by the Merovingian Franks who may have taken this name from older Roman historiography. During these migrations, almost the entire population of the coastal Netherlands was demographically replaced.
The Netherlands in the early Middle Ages was inhabited by various Germanic tribes, including the Frisians, who played a significant role in the development of the region and its Christianisation and eventual incorporation into the Frankish Empire.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
