The Low Countries. Jaargang 14

‘Good butter and good cheese is good English and good Frieze’
Frisian Language and Culture today

‘I am always sorry when any language is lost because languages are the pedigree of nations and they of course are irrepressible’. So said Doctor Johnson almost two centuries ago, and not long after, similar ideas inspired Sir John Bowring's Frisian Literature (1829), one of the first histories of the literature of the Frisians, the linguistic minority living in the northern Dutch province of Fryslân.

The Frisian language is the nearest relative of English on the European mainland, and for many centuries there has been extensive traffic between the two nations. In Suffolk one can still find traces of early medieval Frisian immigration in place names such as Friston and Fressington; and across the North Sea the continental dialect closest to English is the Frisian spoken in the ancient harbour town of Hindeloopen.

Today, as a result of almost four decades of innovative sociolinguistic research by scholars such as Durk Gorter of the Fryske Akademy in Leeuwarden, we are rather well-informed about the actual state of the Frisian language. While the 600,000 inhabitants of the province all know Dutch, some 55% have Frisian as their first language, and 74% are able to speak and understand it. In total this gives some 400,000 social users of the language, and given that this figure has been relatively stable over the past 25 years Gorter is positive about the future, predicting that Frisian ‘will be here on the mainland, a hundred years from now, if in a different, diluted form’ (cf. Drysdale 2001:149).

But although it is stable, the situation of Frisian is not without problems. A worrying demographic trend is the increasing influx of Dutch speakers who often do not bother to learn Frisian, whereas at the same time Frisians are leaving the province in search of higher education and a career. The use of Frisian may also be contested at the national level. Place names, for example, can officially be in Frisian, but the Dutch national Post Office refuses to have anything to do with this. A few years ago, when it was proposed that railway personnel working in Fryslân should be able to speak Frisian, this made the front page of the national newspaper De Telegraaf, which saw it as an almost secessionist proposal. And then there are the internal divisions amongst the Frisians themselves. Recently, for example, the councils of Harlingen and Vlieland sent back documents from another council simply because they were in Frisian.

We have to note here that the position of Frisian is rather different from and not as strongly embedded as that of other European minority languages such as Basque, Catalan and Welsh. In railway stations in Wales, for example, travel announcements are made first in Welsh and then in English. And in the European capital, Brussels - which is the only other officially bilingual part of the Dutch-speaking Low Countries - there is a well-established regime of functional bilingualism, which obliges government offices to provide services in both Dutch and French.

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In Fryslân, in contrast, room for manoeuvre in matters of language is much more limited. Even if Frisian has been officially recognised as the province's second language, language policy in Fryslân is a matter of small advances and the long haul. This has indeed been, from the 1930s onwards, the course towards increasing recognition of Frisian. Along the way, however, the political context has changed completely, from the monolithic Dutch nation-state of the 1930s to the increasingly globalised world of today. Today, the European Charter for Regional and Indigenous Minority Languages (1998) and the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity (2001) present opportunities and challenges for minority languages that are being actively explored by the provincial authorities through a series of covenants with the national government.

As a result, we now have an interesting document on Frisian language policy, The Natural Place of Frisian (De natuurlijke plaats van het Fries), in which the provincial authorities have set out their vision and goals for the period 2003-2007. Their starting point is a recognition that in Fryslân bi- and multilingualism are an everyday social reality. And their central aim is to create a climate in which speaking Frisian is considered normal at all levels of communication, high and low, internally as well as externally. To achieve this, there is an ongoing campaign to stimulate the use of Frisian in government, in the schools, the media and at work, in culture, sports, the arts and sciences, and also of course in the home.

An issue of central importance in this respect is that of education. Here, the standard Dutch model is that of transitional bilingualism. That is, Frisian may be used in the early years of primary school, but after that the language of instruction will have to be Dutch. And, as national Education Minister Maria van der Hoeven has said, teachers from elsewhere in the Netherlands do not have to learn Frisian when they come to live and teach in Fryslân. But surely, more needs to be done if one wants to ensure that Frisian school leavers are fully qualified in each of their languages. Meanwhile, an interesting experiment has been running since 1997 with trilingual primary education in Frisian, Dutch and English. As Beetsma's Mercator-Education report of 2002 makes clear, this may well have a wider significance for other linguistic minorities across Europe. Furthermore, on a world scale we note that in India too many schools are offering trilingual education.

But first things first. What matters most is the vitality of Frisian culture in its homeland. A helpful insight is provided here by the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, who described Frisian culture as ‘volks’ (‘popular’), in contradistinction to the dominant Dutch culture, which he saw as ‘burgerlijk’ (‘bourgeois’).

It is certainly true that Frisian is first and foremost the spoken language of the people, and that Frisian culture is above all an oral culture. There is an active amateur scene in Frisian village theatre throughout the province. Storytelling is common, whether it is in summer time on the ‘boasting benches’ around the harbours, or during storytelling competitions in vil-

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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

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diversity. But the question is how these will be implemented in practice. Meanwhile, the Frisians, as a linguistic minority, have for many centuries had a language and a culture of their own, and today they too are having to find new ways forward in an increasingly Dutch-dominated context. It takes two to tango, and the first step here is to recognise the value of linguistic diversity and bilingualism, not as a social obstacle or a handicap, but as a substantial enrichment of the culture of the Frisians as much as of the Netherlands.

Reinier Salverda

References

Bruinsma, Klaas et al. (eds.), Gjin grinzen, de reis/Geen grenzen, de reis/No borders, the voyage. Leeuwarden: The Cepher Foundation (including a CD with recitals), 2004.

Drysdale, Helena, Mother Tongues. Travels through Tribal Europe. London: Picador, 2001

Erkelens, Helma, Language of the heart. Leeuwarden: Province of Fryslân, 2004.

Gorter, Durk, ‘Nederlands en Fries op gespannen voet? Over ontwikkelingen in de taalverhoudingen in Fryslân’. In: Jan Stroop (ed.), Waar gaat het Nederlands naartoe? Panorama van een taal. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, pp. 84-94, 2003.

Gorter, Durk, Alex Riemersma & Jehannes Ytsma, ‘Frisian in the Netherlands’. In: Guus Extra & Durk Gorter (eds.), The Other languages of Europe. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, pp. 103-118, 2001.

Hettinga, Tsjêbbe, Strange Shores, Frjemde kusten (Tr. James Brockway). Leeuwarden: Frysk en Frij, 1999.

Oppewal, Teake, ‘The Frisian Literary Industry in 13 Paragraphs’. In: Literatuur uit Friesland/Literatuer út Fryslân/Literature from Friesland. Amsterdam: Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature, 2001, 63 pp. Postma, Obe, What the Poet Must Know. An Anthology (Tr. Anthony Paul; selection and introduction by Jabik Veenbaas). Leeuwarden: Tresoar, 2004.

Salverda, Reinier, ‘Frisian’. In: Glanville Price (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Languages of Europe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.

Salverda, Reinier, ‘The Other Languages of the Netherlands’. In: The Low Countries vol. 8. Rekkem: Ons Erfdeel vzw, pp. 245-252, 2000.

Fryslân: www.fryslan.nl - Fryske Akademy: www.fa.knaw.nl - Leeuwarder Courant: www.leeuwardercourant.nl (see under ‘Frysk’) - Tresoar: www.tresoar.nl