Language maintenance and standardization in Frisian Go with the flow (but row your own boat) Eric Hoekstra & Arjen Versloot

Resilience and shift: language change in the past Social factors Linguistic factors

Language maintenance: language change in the future Social factors Linguistic factors Linguistic factors relevant for language standardisation and education

Past and future Learn from the past of the language … … in order to shape its future.

Linguistic factors: how to investigate Frisian Language Corpus Accessible but under construction

Linguistic change in the history of Frisian under the influence of Dutch Which changes occurred? Why did the changes which occurred occur? Why did many conceivable changes fail to occur?

Why did the changes which occurred occur? Which items in Frisian lost the competition with Dutch? Which items in Frisian did not get replaced?

Theory of language change Two items compete. One of them ‘wins’.

Change in a minority language Two items within Frisian compete. The item that is more similar to the corresponding item in Dutch wins through secondary activation.

What is secondary activation? Saying or hearing the Frisian word FOARDIEL (=advantage) causes a primary activation of the neural representation of that word in the brain. It causes a secondary activation of items similar to it, such as the Dutch word VOORDEEL.

Experiencing or producing the Dutch word VOORDEEL Neural representation of Dutch VOORDEEL is activated. Neural representation of Frisian FOARDIEL is secondarily activated.

Secondary activation of similar items: which? Same meaning (synonyms, antonyms) Same form: rhymes, same suffix, same prefix, same inflectional paradigm Similar words in other languages

Scheme of secondary activation for Dutch singular VOORDEEL “Voordelen” (Dutch, plural, same paradigm) “Foardiel” (Frisian, similar form, same meaning) “Nadeel (Dutch, antonym, similar form)

Example Dutch VOORDEEL Frisian has two words roughly meaning ‘advantage’: foardielfertuten Due to secondary activation by Dutch voordeel, Frisian foardiel will win out against Frisian fertuten.

Influence of Dutch on Frisian Given two competing elements within Frisian, the element that is more similar to a corresponding Dutch item increases its chance of survival through secondary activation. Several such cases from the history of Frisian will be presented in the remainder of this talk.

Competing suffixes Frisian has two words meaning ‘wisdom’: wizenswiisheid Dutch only has: wijsheid

Dutch wijsheid supports Fr. wiisheid Scheme of secondary activation: FrisianDutch wizens <= WIJSHEID wiisheid <= Competition in Frisian influenced by Dutch!

Suffixes –ENS and –HEID compete: Dutch –HEID supports Frisian -HEID FrisianDutch wiisheidwizenswijsheid healwiisheidhealwizens- dwaasheiddwazensdwaasheid krigelheidkrigelens- Most frequent item underlined and boldfaced

-HEID and –ENS in Frisian Specifically, Frisian -HEID formations were increasingly used if they were more similar to Dutch -HEID formations. By implication the semantically equivalent competing -ENS formations were less used in those cases. (Versloot & Hoekstra 2011, ms)

Two types of competition Competition between individual words. Competition between classes of words: all words in –HEID compete as a class against all words in –ENS (Words in –HEID share –HEID as a similarity; the same for words in –ENS)

Another example of competition between groups of words Frisian-Dutch phonemic correspondence Frequent: Dutch /y(:)/  Frisian /u(:)/ Infrequent: Dutch /y(:)/  Frisian /e(:)/

Frequent phonemic correspondence Dutch words in /y(:)/ correspond to Frisian words in /u(:)/ in the 16-17th centuries. Frisian Dutch /lu:d//ly:d/ ‘loud’ /pust//pyst/‘pimple’

Infrequent phonemic correspondence Dutch words in /y(:)/ correspond to Frisian words in /e(:)/ in some rare cases. FrisianDutch /hede//hyd/‘hide’ /fest//fyst/‘fist’

The infrequent correspondence is changed to fit the frequent one /hede/ >/hu:d/Dutch /hyd/ ‘hide’ /fest/ >/fust/Dutch /fyst/ ‘fist on the analogy of: /lu:d/Dutch ly:d/ ‘loud’ /pust/Dutch /pyst/ ‘pimple’

Two types of competition/change Competition and change under the influence of Dutch Competition and change within Frisian itself without influence from Dutch

Irregular plural ‘geese’ ‘This plural changed twice in the history of Frisian The first change was not influenced by Dutch but an autonomous development. The second was influenced by Dutch.

Irregular plural in Frisian before the 19th century SGPL goesgies ‘goose’ ‘geese’

Assimilated to the frequent pattern in the 19th century: goes-guozzen(exit gies) following the frequent pattern with vowel shortening and glide insertion: koes-kuozzen ‘molar’ hoed-huodden‘hat’ foet-fuotten‘foot’

Change two (dialects) Goes is replaced with gâns from Dutch gans. Plural is regular gânzen, without vowel change. => This change is under the influence of Dutch. => ‘Frisian’ pronunciation present with plosive /g/ instead of Dutch fricative /x/.

Irregular verbs Regularisation of irregular verbs in Frisian takes place or fails to take place under the influence of Dutch.

Similarity with Dutch protects certain types from changing Frisianklimmeklomklommen Dutchklimmenklomgeklommen (= to climb) More verbs belonging to this class remain strong than expected due to their similarity with Dutch (Versloot 2011).

Lack of similarity with Dutch leads to increased rate of change Frisianbliedebletteblet Dutchbloedenbloeddegebloed (= to bleed) Verbs belonging to this class change (become weak) faster than expected due to their lack of similarity with Dutch.

Lessons 1 Changes within Frisian taking place under the influence of Frisian itself should not be resisted.

Lessons 2 Infrequent words and regularities must be given up; they are doomed. Energy spent in trying to maintain these is energy wasted.

Lessons 3 All attention in language maintenance should go to frequent words and regularities.

Thank you for your attention on behalf of Arjen Versloot and myself.