Eastern Friesland Low Saxon

     From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Eastern Friesland Low Saxon is a variant of the Low Saxon language. It is spoken in East Frisia where it replaced the former East Frisian language which belonged to the Frisian language family. East Frisian now is extinct except in a small language island in the so called Saterland outside East Frisia where it is still spoken by about 1000 persons. This language however is now called "Saterfrisian" or "Seeltersk".

Eastern Friesland Low Saxon is strongly influenced by the Frisian substrate and has received influences also from Dutch and French due to historical events.

There has been a border between the Ems-Frisian and the Weser-Frisian variant (named after the rivers Ems and Weser) of East Frisian in former times which is still reflected in lexical and phonemical features of today's Eastern Friesland Low Saxon. As an example: In most parts of East Frisia "to speak" is "prōten" but in the former Weser-Frisian areas like the Harlingerland it is "snakken".

Eastern Friesland Low Saxon has a strong system of alternating vowels or diphthongs of different length which can stand alone as phonemes but also found allophonic groups for special grammatical reasons (for example the differentiation of singular or plural forms). Potentially there are three vowel (or diphthong) lengths but some of them only appear in two.

In some local variants there are also triphthongs but these have to be regarded as allophones to diphthongs (mainly it is -iaej- instead of -aej-). There is also a tendency towards diphthongization of vowels (especially long ones) which has to be distinguished from real diphthongs.

Traditionally Eastern Friesland Low Saxon is written in a German based orthography which isn't able to show the correct sounds or to represent the grammatical features adequately. Since 1975 there is an alternative orthography which has been improved in recent years but this isn't very widespread in use because many writers don't want to leave their traditional way and official institutions like the "Ostfriesische Landschaft" don't accept an own East Frisian way within the Low Saxon language society.

links: <http://www.holger-weigelt.de/projekte/platt/plattrahmen.html> German with English summary