‘Kinsto it Frysk ferstean?’
Intelligibility of West Frisian for Dutch native speakers
West Frisian is a minoritized language spoken in the province of Fryslân, in the Netherlands. It has been said to
be converging with Standard Dutch (see
De Haan, 1997;
Nerbonne, 2001), and it has been found to be largely intelligible for speakers of regional language
varieties in the Netherlands, such as Low Saxon or Limburgish for example (see, for instance,
De Vries, 2010).
In this research, we tested how much Frisian native speakers of Dutch can actually understand, as well as the
degree of difficulty of each type of task. An online test was designed (
N = 225) to measure the intelligibility
of both written and spoken Frisian. The results seem to indicate that West Frisian is highly intelligible for Dutch native
speakers, which we argue should be used to enrich the school curriculum and foster receptive skills in the minoritized language
(see
Fonseca, 2012;
Belmar, 2019b), which
could in turn boost its use.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The West Frisian context
- 3.Mutual intelligibility of closely related languages:West Frisian and Dutch
- 4.Methodology
- 4.1Participants
- 4.2Material
- Reading exercises
- Listening exercises
- Translation exercises
- 4.3Data analysis
- 5.Results
- 6.Discussion and conclusion
- Notes
-
References
References (59)
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