Scholars have taken to calling it the Frisian paradox. The inhabitants of the province of Friesland (Fryslân) are not the richest in the Netherlands, nor are they the ones with the best educational scores. But, contrary to the prevailing thought, which links both aspects to higher levels of personal satisfaction, the inhabitants of Friesland are the happiest in the country, according to official statistics, which attribute this apparent contradiction to factors such as strong social cohesion. The prospects for his beloved language, Frisian, however, are not exactly happy.
About 450,000 people speak it today, explains Professor Goffe Jensma, who has held the chair of Frisian Language at the University of Groningen (RUG) for 14 years. “The numbers are quite stable, which is extraordinary in these times, and people are very proud of her. But that is not to say that the Friesian is not vulnerable. As a minority language, its knowledge in written form is limited, and this exposes it more to the influence of other languages ??”, he warns. He himself has become a symbol of his threatening future. Today, he is the last professor of Frisian. He retired this course and has not been replaced by another professor of the same rank but by a part-time assistant.
The decline in the academic status of Frisian has sparked intense mobilization. Seventy Frisian writers, linguists, scientists and politicians wrote a letter to Interior Minister Hanke Bruins Slot in November, criticizing the RUG’s decision and warning that without academic study at the highest level, the language will not survive. Several parties have asked the Government in Parliament about the language situation, which was discussed for the first time in The Hague. The objective is to take advantage of the renewal of the agreement between the central government and the province to set a higher degree of protection by law.
Derived from the western branch of the Germanic languages, the Frisian languages ??are currently spoken in Friesland and part of the German Länder of Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony. Linguistically, they are close to English and derive from the language that was spoken in the sixth century in the so-called Magna Frisia. Like Catalan, Galician and Basque, they have a solid written tradition since the Middle Ages. At the beginning of the 19th century, romanticism and nationalism intensified literary production in regional languages, Frisian among them.
Since 1970, it has enjoyed the same official status as Dutch in the Netherlands. 60% of the inhabitants of Friesland use it daily. It is taught in school and can be used by its speakers to communicate with the administration and in court. And, although it is not a requirement to access a job, one in four new Frisians learns it. But in the context of globalization and digital communication, the work of the university is considered crucial to ensure the good health of the language in its most cultured registers.
The RUG receives a subsidy of 220,000 euros a year for maintaining the Frisística chair, and the contract provides for it to have a teacher, the NRC newspaper has revealed, which at this time it would not comply with. The institution alleges that it was impossible to find a replacement with the appropriate level. In the Frisian cultural world, this explanation is questioned and it is affirmed that there were a dozen candidates prepared. The number of graduates in Frisian has been in decline for years. This course there are only four students. For Jensma, the university has been carried away by a “mercantilist vision”.
“As a university, if you want, it is not difficult to make the number of students fall, which is what has happened here. But you can also look at these figures backwards and support the language because you see that there is a great need for specialists to work in public spaces such as schools, cultural institutions, the media and the administration. That should be the reasoning”, says Jensma, since, despite her good oral health, her written knowledge of the language is “extremely limited”. Rianne van der Wier, a 24-year-old student from Friesland, endorses it. She speaks Frisian at home and uses it with many friends. “But I have to admit that when we communicate on WhatsApp, I write it as it sounds, not according to the spelling rules. I realize that I know the language worse than my parents, ”she explains after declaring herself“ proud ”of her language and culture.
The risk, linguists warn, is that, under pressure from Dutch and English, it ends up becoming a dialect. “I hope that the pressure and the better knowledge of the situation will help something. Preserving the language is not an objective in itself, but it is important because of the positive feelings it generates in the population. Create a connection, a union. A very prominent word in Frisian is precisely mienskip, which means community.
