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Saterland and North Frisian [11] [better source needed] are officially recognised and protected as minority languages in Germany, and West Frisian is one of the two official languages in the Netherlands, the other being Dutch. ISO 639-1 code fy and ISO 639-2 code fry were assigned to "Frisian", but that was changed in November 2005 to "Western ...
Of these three languages both Saterland Frisian (2,000 speakers) and North Frisian (10,000 speakers) [39] are endangered. West Frisian is spoken by around 350,000 native speakers in Friesland, [40] and as many as 470,000 when including speakers in neighbouring Groningen province. [4]
Friesland has 643,000 inhabitants (2005), of whom 94% can understand spoken West Frisian, 74% can speak West Frisian, 75% can read West Frisian, and 27% can write it. [2] For over half of the inhabitants of the province of Friesland, 55% (c. 354,000 people), West Frisian is the native language.
For example, English has about 450 million native speakers but, depending on the criterion chosen, can be said to have as many as two billion speakers. [4] There are also difficulties in obtaining reliable counts of speakers, which vary over time because of population change and language shift.
What is noteworthy about the Saterland Frisians today is that they have preserved the old Frisian language, the last Frisians in East Frisia to do so, Approximately 1,000-2,500 people speak a Frisian dialect interspersed with elements of Low Saxon known as Saterland Frisian. Research by the University of Göttingen put the number at 2,250 persons.
Today there exists a tripartite division of the original Frisians; namely the North Frisians, East Frisians and West Frisian, caused by the Frisia's constant loss of territory in the Middle Ages, but the West Frisians in the general do not feel or see themselves as part of a larger group of Frisians, and, according to a 1970 inquiry, identify ...
The Frisian languages are a group of languages spoken by about 500,000 Frisian people on the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands and Germany. West Frisian, by far the most spoken of the three main branches with 875,840 total speakers, [11] [full citation needed] constitutes an official language in the Dutch province of Friesland.
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