Frisian: English's Closest Cousin

College Students like to procrastinate. Whether they watch Netflix or go out with friends most students tend to have a favorite means of procrastinating. For me, my favorite way to procrastinate is through educational youtube videos. One of my favorite channels used for this purpose is LangFocus, a channel which focuses on linguistics by exploring what makes certain languages different, and what brings certain languages together. This week, LangFocus released a video about the Frisian language. What is the Frisian language? Frisian is spoken predominately in Northern parts of the Netherlands (although there are dialects of Frisian spoken in parts of Germany and Denmark if my prior knowledge serves me right). Frisian is best known for its relationship to English, with it being the closest relative to English (aside from Scots which has its language status disputed). 

Like German and Dutch, both Frisian and English are examples of West Germanic Languages, meaning that these four languages all share a common ancestor language making them all very closely related; that being said, Frisian and English diverged from one another more recently than most languages in the family, with written Frisian and written English sharing some clear similarities.  For example, LangFocus uses the phrase "Sy hat dit jier fyftjin boeken lezen" or in English "She has read fifteen books this year." The similarities are clear: "Sy" and "She", "fyftjin" and "fifteen", "jier" and "year". That being said, there are some clear differences in word order from this passage compared to English. A key difference, however, is that Frisian maintains two grammatical genders (neuter and common) whereas English lost grammatical gender at some point during the transition between Old and Middle English. 

English has also changed a lot since diverging from Frisian. English underwent a long period of contact with speakers of Old Norse through the Viking Age, and following the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, English integrated a lot of French vocabulary into its own.

Despite the differences between the two, Frisian is still considered to be the easiest language for native English speakers to learn, easier than other closely related languages like Afrikaans, German, or Dutch, or languages from which English has borrowed a lot of vocabulary such as French. 

Frisian is also a language in decline. Since the birth of the Netherlands, Frisian has been losing favor to Dutch as the language of government, education, and communication even in the parts of the Netherlands in which it has historically been spoken. It is, like too many minority languages across the world, in decline. It is important for the linguistic and human diversity of this planet that we try to preserve minority languages, like Frisian not just for the sake of those native speakers who love their language, but also because of what minority languages can teach us about ourselves and each other.