Causes and development of language shift: Dynamics of the historical multilingualism in Friedrichstadt 1650-1850
Jan Niklas Heinrich's 2024 dissertation analyzed the language history of Friedrichstadt (Nordfriesland) beginning with its Dutch beginnings in the 17th century and continuing through its High German present day. Founded by Dutch religious refugees, Dutch remained a major language in Friedrichstadt for many decades, and in some cases, for centuries, such as in official (administrative) language and church language. The main goal of the project was to create a detailed overview of the language history, and especially the history of language use, in a setting where an immigrant language held more prestige than the dominant language of the surrounding area. This was done in order to better understand processes of language shift, including how people dealt with multilingualism in their everyday lives and which social factors such as class or religion played a role. Which languages were used, when, and in which domains? Are bidirectional influences noticeable? Which factors assisted language maintenance, and which led to language shift? Data to answer these questions were drawn from letters, diaries, official meeting minutes, and reports about and from around Friedrichstadt regarding language use and language proficiency. Meta-linguistic commentary were analyzed and put into context with the social factors of the writers, and findings were placed in linguistic, historical, theological, and cultural-scientific contexts.
This research was funded through a Fellowship of the State of Schleswig-Holstein.
Minority languages and identity in the diaspora
Robert Kleih's research at the EUF focused on the development of a minority language (North Frisian) in the diaspora. His research looked at how the North Frisian language and culture in the USA developed and maintained up until today. Between the 1840s and 1966, many thousand North Frisians (especially from the islands of Föhr and Amrum) immigrated to the United States. Major destinations for these immigrants were Petaluma, California, the Midwest, and New York City and surrounding. In some of these areas, Americans with North Frisian roots can still be found, including some who have maintained or reestablished connections to North Frisia. Kleih gathered data on North Frisian communities in the US from a survey and interviews conducted in 2018.
- Kleih, Robert. 2022. Postvernacular Identity in Two North Frisian Immigrant Communities in the USA. In Selected Proceedings of the 11th Workshop on Immigrant Languages in the Americas (WILA 11). 63-70.
Reconstruction of historical social networks
In this project, Dr. Samantha M. Litty focused on the reconstruction of the social networks between individual writers in the American Midwest and Northern Germany based on private letters from the 19th century. The data were gathered from local archives (Dansk Centralbibliotek for Sydslesvig, Grundhof Kirchspiel Archiv, Wisconsin Historical Society & Archives), historical societies (Lomira Historical Society, Old Franklin Township Historical Society) and personal collections (Reedsburg). The analysis was supported and triangulated with additional data from historical-sociolinguistic factors such as societal structure and language domain, age, education, personal language histories and individual linguistic features. The goal of the project was to show the spread of individual networks and the interaction of linguistic elements in bi- and multilingual regions, and the potential effects of language input from multiple varieties, as well as connecting the linguistic history of a given region with the present.
- Litty, Samantha M. 2022. Historical Sociolinguistic Contexts: Networks and Feature Availability in 19th Century German Letter Collections. In Selected Proceedings of the 11th Annual Workshop on Immigrant Languages in the Americas (WILA 11). 40-47.
Social media and the use of North Frisian
Hauke Heyen's research focused on North Frisian in digital communications in services such as WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter. Heyen's research focused on obstacles in digital communication, which often affect small and regional languages in particular. In addition to the obvious limited reach, this is often due to a lack of or limited writing tradition, which is accompanied by conceptual (occupation of the written domain by another language, orthographic standard printing) and technical (lack of support for diacritical marks, lack of support for automatic correction software or incorrect corrections) challenges.
- Heyen, Hauke. 2022. #hokerbeest? Auf der Suche nach digitaler nordfriesischer Kommunikation. In Alastair Walker, Eric Hoekstra, Goffe Jensma, Wendy Vanselow, Willem Visser & Christoph Winter (eds.), From West to North Frisia: A Journey along the North Sea Coast. Frisian studies in honour of Jarich Hoekstra. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 133-148.
- Belmar, Guillem & Hauke Heyen. 2021. Virtual Frisian: A comparison of language use in North and West Frisian virtual communities. Language Documentation & Conservation 15. 285-315.
Historical dialectology and North Frisian data
Temmo Bosse's 2019 doctoral dissertation (supervised at Kiel University) investigated the quality of data from historical dialect surveys of North Frisian. Specifically, the materials were collected in the course of Georg Wenker's large-scale survey for the "Sprachatlas des Deutschen Reichs" (Linguistic Atlas of the German Empire). Although these so-called "Frisian Wenker materials" represent only a very small part of the entire language survey in the former German Empire, there has never been a more detailed study of the language in North Frisia. The materials originate - with few exceptions - from the late 19th century. Since then, however, they have rarely been taken into account in Frisian research, as they were difficult to access for a long time, and also had a reputation for being unreliable. These include more than seventy questionnaires from sixty-three locations in North Frisia (as well as six more from Saterland and Wangerooge). Local primary school teachers completed the questionnaires, writing out each of the 40 sentences - now well-known as the "Wenker sentences" - in the respective Frisian dialect of their village. The material also includes dialects of the North and East Frisian languages that have since become extinct. In the course of this research project, these historical dialect data will be made accessible, examined and evaluated as examples.
- Bosse, Temmo. 2021. Das nord-und ostfriesische Wenkermaterial: Hintergründe, Validität und Erkenntniswert. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag.
Effectiveness of language policy
From March 2018 to September 2019, a case study on North Frisian as part of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage funded research project, Sustaining Minority Languages in Europe (SMiLE) was conducted. Flensburg researchers Femmy Admiraal, Temmo Bosse, Nils Langer and Lena Terhart worked together with colleagues Antje Arfsten and Thomas Steensen from the Nordfriisk Instituut to study which role(s) language policy decisions, such as those regarding language lessons/ language of instruction in schools impacted the use and perception of North Frisian. The Smithsonian funded this case study together with six other projects regarding other European minority languages.
More detailed information about this project can be found here, and a final report was published upon completion of the project:
- Admiraal, F. Langer, N. & Terhart, L. (2019). Measuring Effectiveness: A Study on Changes in Minority Language Use and Perception due to Revitalisation Efforts, with Evidence from North Frisian. Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.25573/data.21411705