The Frisian Languages — a note

Linguistic

⚠ A WARNING ROW, AND THE MOST IMPORTANT ONE HERE. THREE LIVING FRISIAN LANGUAGES, not dialects of one: WEST FRISIAN (Frysk), about half a million speakers, co-official in Fryslân; NORTH FRISIAN (Frasch, Fering, Öömrang, Sölring and other varieties, themselves barely mutually intelligible), a few thousand speakers in Schleswig-Holstein; and SATERLAND FRISIAN (Seeltersk), around a thousand speakers in four villages, the ONLY survivor of East Frisian. ⚠ MODERN EAST FRISIA DOES NOT SPEAK FRISIAN — it speaks Low German, and has since roughly 1500. Frisian’s closest relative is English. Food terms are preserved in the local language, never replaced by Dutch or German ones.