12 Funding opportunities
Funding for projects in education
The province of Fryslân plays a very important role in promoting the Frisian language and within their subsidy scheme for international contacts, schools can apply for a grant to organised exchanges between Frisian pupils or other minority groups in Europe.
Within the Taalplan Frysk (The Frisian language plan) schools from every level of education can apply for a subsidy to fund, for example
- Training for in-service teachers
- Teaching materials
- Cultural exchanges aiming introducing the Frisian language and culture to pupils
- Additional deployment of staff, teachers and lecturers to work assignments specific to teaching Frisian at school, for example creating new materials, working on a school’s language policy document or organising activities to promote reading.
Funding for literary projects
The province of Fryslân plays a very important role in promoting the Frisian language and Frisian literature and offers different funding streams for a number of Frisian language areas:
- Frisian literature, theatre plays and writing A subsidy aiming at stimulating the writing of original Frisian works.
- Publishing Frisian literature Subsidy that can be applied for to publish books in the Frisian language, which includes printed books, eBooks, and audiobooks.
- Promotion of books in Frisian As the name already indicates, this line of subsidy is targeted at promoting already published works in Frisian. Writers, publishers and other stakeholders can apply for a grant.
- Translation and editing of literature This line of subsidy you can apply for a grant to either translate a Frisian work into another language or Frisian regional language, translate from another language into Frisian, translation of a manuscript to Frisian of an unpublished book, or for editing new Frisian fiction and non-fiction
- International contacts This funding streams is targeted at a wide group of young Frisian language professionals and pupils (schools, theater and film makers, writers, journalists etc.) that wish to organise networking opportunities and cultural events between these Frisian language professionals and minority language communities in Europe.
- Visibility of Frisian language A funding stream for non-governmental organisations financing e.g. means of communication aimed at the public, activities that demonstrably increase the visibility and hearing of the Frisian language structurally and for a longer period of time
Next to the province of Fryslân, the Nederlands letterenfonds (Dutch foundation for literature) offers subsidies for translating fiction and non-fiction into Frisian (or Dutch). The foundation supports writers and translators, and promotes Dutch literature abroad. Further opportunities and news about funding can be found on the website Leeuwarden City of Literature.
Takeaways
There are funding opportunities for a variety of projects or activities that are related to Frisian. Do you have a project idea or is there an activity you want to carry out? Through the links provided above, you hopefully find ways to (co-)finance your plans!
Do you work with another minority language? Then maybe there are similar organisations or bodies offering funding for your projects or activities?
Learn about other languages!
This is the end of the West Frisian unit. We hope you got new insights into the Frisian world and enjoyed learning about the language.
There are many other minority languages spoken in Europe and with OWL+ you can learn about three more!
- Latgalian in Latvia
- Mirandese in Portugal
- South Saami in Norway
The units’ outlines are the same, so you can easily compare information across the languages. Have fun exploring other languages and their contexts!
