East Frisian Low Saxon

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East Frisian Low Saxon
Spoken in:	Germany
Region:	East Frisia
Total speakers:	230,000 in Germany
Language family:	Indo-European Germanic West Germanic Low German West Low German East Frisian Low Saxon
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	none
ISO 639-2:	`nds`
ISO 639-3:	`nds`
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

East Frisian Low Saxon is a West Low German dialect spoken in the Eastern Friesland peninsula of northwestern Lower Saxony. It is used quite frequent in everyday talk there. About half of the East Frisian population in the coastal region uses Platdüütsk. A number of individuals, despite not being active speakers of Low Saxon, are able to understand it to some extent. But both active and passive language skills are in a state of decrease.

Although the East Frisian language is spoken by about 2000 individuals in the three villages of Ramsloh, Strücklingen and Scharrel in the Saterland region outside Eastern Friesland, in this context East Frisian Low Saxon is unrelated to Frisian.

There are several dialects in East Frisian Low Saxon. There are two main groups of dialects. The dialects in the east - called Harlinger Platt - have already stronger influences by the Northern Low Saxon of Oldenburg. The western dialects are closer to the Low Saxon Language spoken in Groningen (NL).^[1]

East Frisian Low Saxon differs from Northern Low Saxon in several aspects, which are often linked to Frisian heritage. The language originally spoken in East Frisia and Groningen used to be Frisian, so the current Low Saxon dialects build on a Frisian substrate, which has led to a large amount of unique lexical, syntactic, and phonological items which differ from other Low Saxon variants.

We find a frequent use of diminutives like in the Dutch language, e.g. Footjes = little feet, Kluntje = piece of sugar. In many cases diminutives of names especially female ones have become names of their own. For example: Antje (from Anna), Trientje (from Trina = Katharina) etc.

Based on the special history of Eastern Friesland there are influences and loans from French and the Dutch language which in parts of East Frisia for a long time was the language of the church.

The dialects spoken in East Frisia are closely related to those spoken in the Dutch province of Groningen (Grunnegs, Grünnigs) and in Northern Drenthe (Noordenvelds). The biggest difference seem to be that of loanwords (from Dutch or German, resp.) and the vowel shift in Gronings: [ɛi] → [ɑi, ɔi], [ɑi] → [ai], [ou] → [ɑu] and so forth.

Examples
East Frisian Low Saxon	Gronings	Northern Low Saxon	English
[høːə]	[høːə]	[eə]	her
[moːi]	[moːi]	[ʃœːin]	beautiful, nice, fine
[vas]	[vas]	[vɛ.iə]	was
[gebø:rɪn]	[ɣəbø:rɪn]	[passe.rn]	to happen
[prɔ.tɪn, proːtɪn]	[pro.tɪn]	[snakɪn]	to talk

The standard greeting formula is Moin (moi in Gronings), used 24 hours a day. It is nowadays used in whole northern Germany, but more and more spreading to the east, west and south.