Postdoc project on an extinct Frisian language of northern Germany
Wangerooge Frisian is a now extinct Frisian language once spoken on Wangerooge, a small island in the German Wadden Sea. This language was extensively documented before it went extinct in the first half of the 20th century, but has so far received little attention in the linguistic literature. My current project is a grammatical description of the Wangerooge Frisian language as it was preserved in documentation mainly from the 19th century. The project is supported by the Carlsberg Foundation and hosted by the Department of Frisian Studies at Kiel University.
View of Wangerooge. Photo: Martina Nolte, 2012 (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE)
The language of Wangerooge was a remnant of the medieval Old Frisian language, which had gradually lost ground to Low German since the Middle Ages. A chronicle from 1671 mentions that the inhabitants of Wangerooge had their own language ‘which an outsider cannot understand at all’ (“eine besondere [Sprach] / die ein fremder / gar nicht verstehen kan”). The first linguistic documentation of this language consists of a word list and some grammatical notes from around 1800.
The main reason that we can study Wangerooge Frisian today is the work of H. G. Ehrentraut (1798–1866) and his consultants. Ehrentraut was a lawyer and politician who developed a strong interest in Frisian language and history. In the period 1837–1841 he carried out fieldwork on Wangerooge and wrote down texts in Wangerooge Frisian in his own phonetic alphabet. The material includes fairy tales, descriptions of daily life on the island, and extensive lists of words and grammatical forms. Some of this was published in Ehrentraut’s own journal Friesisches Archiv (1849–1855), but most of it lay hidden in an archive until it was published by Versloot (1996).
H. G. Ehrentraut (1798–1866)
The middle of the 19th century also marked the beginning of the end of Wangerooge Frisian. After a tidal flood destroyed much of the village on Wangerooge in 1855, the inhabitants were resettled on the mainland. Within only a few generations most people had stopped speaking Wangerooge Frisian and switched to Low German instead. When the German linguist Theodor Siebs (1862–1941) visited the community in the 1920s, only seven elderly speakers remained.
Linguistic fieldwork on Wangerooge Frisian (Varel, 1926)
In my project, I describe the grammatical structure of Wangerooge Frisian using the material collected by Ehrentraut, Siebs, and other people who took an interest in the language. A short project description can also be found on the website of the Carlsberg Foundation. A preliminary syntactic sketch of Wangerooge Frisian is available here. This is still very much work in progress, so feel free to send me an email if you have any comments or suggestions.
Presentations
Title
Event
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An evidential perfect in Wangerooge Frisian (Germanic, Northern Germany)
This paper investigates the use of definite articles in Wangerooge Frisian (Germanic, northern Germany) and discusses a number of methodological problems in the analysis of definiteness in an extinct linguistic variety. I show that Wangerooge Frisian exhibited a ‘split’ definiteness system with two formally and functionally distinct definite articles: the ‘weak’ article de/’t and the ‘strong’ article dan/djuu/dait/daa. Similar systems have been described for other languages of the world, including other Germanic varieties. However, the analysis of the Wangerooge Frisian system is complicated by a number of factors relating to the nature of the linguistic documentation, most of which was collected from an elderly speaker in the mid-19th century. The paper discusses five such issues, such as the lack of metadata about the elicitation situation and the inconsistent stress marking in much of the documentation. I then present a brief sketch of the definiteness system which takes these limitations into account.
@article{gregersen2024def,title={Split definiteness and historical language documentation: {Observations} from {Wangerooge} {Frisian}},author={Gregersen, Sune},journal={Linguistics in Amsterdam},volume={15},number={1},pages={71--96},year={2024},}
This paper analyses the use of verbal tense forms in Wangerooge Frisian, a West Germanic language spoken on the Wadden Sea island Wangerooge until the early twentieth century. Specifically, the use of the present, past, and perfect constructions is investigated in a corpus of texts from the nineteenth century. It is argued that the Wangerooge Frisian perfect could be used as a non-firsthand evidential strategy marking the propositional content as hearsay or inferred. While such evidential perfects are cross-linguistically well attested, they are generally thought to be uncommon in Western European languages. The Wangerooge Frisian case thus shows the value of lesser-studied vernaculars for the typology of European languages.
@article{gregersen2024evid,title={An evidential perfect in Wangerooge Frisian},author={Gregersen, Sune},journal={Acta Linguistica Hafniensia},volume={56},pages={1--30},doi={10.1080/03740463.2024.2359804},year={2024},}
An overlooked source of Wangerooge Frisian: The birthday invitation of Louwine Luths
The paper presents and discusses a hitherto overlooked text in Wangerooge Frisian, a short birthday invitation written in 1934 by the native speaker Louwine Luths. The text was first published in the members’ bulletin of a local genealogical society, which is currently only available in print in a few German archives. In the paper I re-publish the birthday invitation – along with another short fragment of Wangerooge Frisian from the bulletin – and discuss a number of salient linguistic features. The two short texts are of particular interest because they were written down by native speakers of Wangerooge Frisian.
@article{gregersen2024usw,title={An overlooked source of Wangerooge Frisian: The birthday invitation of Louwine Luths},author={Gregersen, Sune},journal={Us Wurk},volume={73},pages={49--64},doi={10.21827/uw.73.49-64},year={2024},}
2023
Komplementsætninger med V2-ledstilling i wangeroogefrisisk [Complement clauses with V2 word order in Wangerooge Frisian]
The topic of this paper is word order in complement clauses in Wangerooge Frisian, a now extinct language of Northern Germany. Like many other Germanic languages, Wangerooge Frisian had an alternation between verb-second (V2) and verb-late word order in subordinate clauses. The paper investigates the use of V2 and verb-late in complement clauses with dat ‘that’ in the Ehrentraut corpus from the middle of the 19th century. Inspired by the analysis of Danish in Hansen & Heltoft (2011), it is suggested that V2 in Wangerooge Frisian was limited to complement clauses with “constative potential”, while verb-late could occur in all complement clauses.
@article{gregersen2023v2,title={Komplementsætninger med V2-ledstilling i wangeroogefrisisk [Complement clauses with V2 word order in Wangerooge Frisian]},author={Gregersen, Sune},journal={Ny forskning i grammatik},volume={30},pages={40--56},doi={10.7146/nfg.v1i30.137952},year={2023},}
