lage pubs in winter. Frisian poets stand firmly in the bardic tradition: Tsjêbbe Hettinga's poems can of course be read as written texts printed on a page, but they are first of all spoken incantations. And this in fact is one of the great cultural strengths of the Frisians: Frisian literature is closely linked to this oral culture, and the distance between the spoken and the written language of literature is far smaller in Frisian than it is in Dutch.
There is a lively literary production in Frisian of about 100 titles per year, roughly divided amongst 30 titles in prose fiction, 15 in poetry, 30 in children's and young people's literature, and 25 in non-fiction. There are important and original writers of fiction, such as Tiny Mulder, Trinus Riemersma, Rink van der Velde and Reinder van der Leest. In the Fryske Klassiken series more than 25 titles have been published since 1992, and there is a regular flow of Frisian translations from world literature, ranging from Homer to Nietzsche and Walt Whitman. 2004 saw the publication of a bilingual anthology of one of Fryslân's greatest poets of the twentieth century, Obe Postma (1868-1963), and almost at the same time the trilingual volume ‘Where Everything Becomes A Border: The Journey’ presented new work by some 20 young Fri-sian poets. Every year Frisian writers go out to sell their books in the countryside, and every year - as Teake Oppewal has reported - an estimated 60,000 people buy about 90,000 Frisian books, and some 300,000 Frisian library books are borrowed by 70,000 readers.
Beyond literature there are the other arts. In 2001, the Frisian film Nynke (2001) won the highest Dutch cinema award, The Golden Calf (Het gouden kalf), both for best film and for best actress. It is a portrait of the feminist writer Nynke van Hichtum (1860-1939). It is also an ode to Fryslân and Frisian culture; and in it one can hear the most beautiful spoken Frisian I have ever heard. In summer there are open air performances of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream in Frisian, the island of Terschelling hosts the theatre festival Oerol, and the Tryater group performs its intercultural experiments. From the mid-eighties an attractive Frisian pop scene has been led by De Kast, whose In Nije Dei (A New Day) topped the charts in 1997.
However, Huizinga's distinction, while helpful, also has its limitations, for in a culture like the Dutch, which has been burgerlijk for centuries, the term ‘volks’ is not without negative connotations, evoking as it does the unmannered, the uneducated and the lower class - which makes it easy to look down on Frisian as merely a dialect. One can still find this view in Holland, witness a recent piece by the columnist Ronald Plasterk in which he compared Frisian to his own rough city dialect of The Hague, noted that he could read it without much difficulty, and argued that it should be seen as just another dialect of Dutch, and not as a language in its own right.
Here, battle has been joined by a group of young Frisian language activists, the so-called Auwersk group, with a number of eye-catching proposals for symbolic action, such as having FRL bumper stickers on cars (instead of NL), and having Frisian ethnic identity and nationality written into their Dutch passports. These ideas have triggered a lively public debate on the website of the Leeuwarder Courant. What is striking, especially about the passport debate, is how some of the Dutch participants are contesting the use of Frisian: ‘You are living in the Netherlands here, so you should speak Dutch instead of your dialect’, and ‘If you insist on your Frisian identity, you are either backward, provincial villagers, trying to turn Fryslân into a reservation, or extremists infringing upon Dutch people's rights’. Statements such as these are not exactly overflowing with respect for linguistic and cultural diversity. They hark back to an earlier era, when the Netherlands was a much more monocultural and monolingual nation-state than it is today (see also my ‘The Other Languages of the Netherlands’ in TLC 8 (2000)).
This then, to my mind, is what makes the Frisian case so interesting and challenging today. If the quality of a society and culture can be measured by looking at how they deal with their minorities, then this holds true of the Dutch as well - and here they can point to their active support for the new European and UNESCO instruments for linguistic and cultural