2 Who uses Frisian?

Who speaks Frisian? Who can understand it? Who writes in Frisian? And how well do people speak, understand, and write it? This section will answer all of these questions.

In 2019 the province of Fryslân conducted a large-scale survey on the use of Frisian of the province’s inhabitants. The collected data were published in de Friese Taalatlas (the Frisian language atlas), which was used to create the exercise below.

Find out more about Frisian users in Fryslân by working your way through the different tasks. Sukses!

In the first section ‘Where can you read and hear Frisian’ you already learnt about the environment of Frisian speakers. With that knowledge in mind, let’s see if you can deduce the correct answers.

Now let’s move on to some true or false questions.

Do you know what Frisian sounds like? Let’s watch this short video in which Monique tells a bit about herself in both Dutch and Frisian. The video has no subtitles but you can find a summary of Monique’s story below the video.

Monique’s parents are originally from Zeeuws-Vlaanderen, which is the most southern part of the Dutch province Zeeland. On the map you can see Zeeland in the very south-west of the Netherlands, bordering Belgium. But Monique was born and raised in the village Dronryp in Fryslân. She had a big family with a lot siblings and at home they spoke Dutch. Only when she was 4 years old and started going to nursery school she began learning Frisian. Her big brothers and sisters were mocking her for speaking Frisian, calling her a boerenpummel (derogative term about someone from the countryside), but she was proud of learning and speaking Frisian. Monique said that because she spoke Frisian she was able to make a lot of friends in the village, who also viewed her as one of their own. Being accepted in this way was very important for her.