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The Roman historian Tacitus, writing in Germania, mentioned the Frisians among people he grouped together as the Ingvaeones. Their territory followed the coast of the North Sea from the mouth of the Rhine up to that of the Ems, their eastern border according to Ptolemy's Geographica. Pliny states in Belgica that they were conquered by the Roman general Drusus in 12 BC, and thereafter the Frisians largely sank into historical obscurity, until coming into contact with the expanding Merovingian and Carolingian empires. In the 5th century, during this period of historical silence, many of them no doubt joined the migration of the Anglo-Saxons who went through Frisian territory to invade Britain, while those who stayed on the continent expanded into the newly-emptied lands previously occupied by the Anglo-Saxons. By the end of the sixth century the Frisians occupied the coast all the way to the mouth of the Weser and spread farther still in the seventh century, southward down to Dorestad and even Bruges. This farthest extent of Frisian territory is known as Frisia Magna. Continuing his predecessors' capture of Frisian land, Charlemagne conquered the area up to the Elbe at the end of the 8 th century. After the breakup of his Frankish empire in the 9 th century, the Frisian territories were effectively divided into three parts. East Friesland comprised the area stretching from the Ems to the Weser rivers along the North Sea coast, Middle Friesland included the modern Dutch provinces of Friesland and coastal Groningen up to the Ems, and West Friesland covered the northern section of the modern province of Noord-Holland. This last area was granted to the Frankish counts of Holland in 1289, and in time their language became the dominant one in the areas we now call the Netherlands and northern Belgium. Middle and East Friesland consisted of a number of small farmers' republics during the 13 th and 14 th centuries, although they technically owed allegiance to the Holy Roman Emperor. They lost this insecure independence in the 15 th century as increasing stretches of Frisian territory were awarded to Low German, Saxon, and Frankish speaking counts. The modern remnants of Frisia Magna are small and scattered. Most of it got caught in the pincer movement of its expanding neighbors, that of the Saxons who were moving up into their north and west, and the Franks who were pushing into the north and east. West and Middle Friesland are solidly within modern state of the Netherlands, which now includes the "heartland" of the Frisians from the North Sea coast from Alkmaar in the modern province of Noord-Holland, along the coasts of the modern provinces of Friesland and Groningen, and up to the mouth of the Ems. Culturally, it has shrunk down to the province of Friesland alone. Frisian is now spoken only there and in parts of only the Waddensee islands of Terschelling and Schiermonnikoog. East Friesland has been absorbed into the northern provinces of Germany, with only the marshes of Saterland, well inland from the coast, still retaining any cultural identity. There are also descendants of Frisians living on the coast of the Jutland peninsula and nearby islands. It is unclear when they arrived there, or even whether they lived first on the islands and then spread to the mainland, or vice-versa. What remains of their language is under heavy pressure from Low German, Standard German, and Danish, and is generally expected to become extinct. Where the Germanic limb of the Indo-European language tree splits into three branches, Frisian is a twig off the Ingvaeonic (also called the North Sea Germanic) branch. It is so close to English that a further subdivision, the Anglo-Frisian, is sometimes made (e.g. Lass 1987:20 and 1994:15). The assertion that these two languages developed from a common ancestor is questionable in light of the number of divergent features; even Lass admits in the later publication that Anglo-Frisian was "probably not a Protolanguage in the usual sense, but rather a Sprachbund... [a] cluster of dialects with high-intensity mutual contact and borrowing, and a certain amount of common innovation" (Lass 1994:14). Even so, however, they are undeniably the two most closely related Ingvaeonic languages. They share, among more common features, two which are considered characteristic: Anglo-Frisian Brightening, and assibilation of velars before front vowels. Under the influence of Anglo-Frisian Brightening, original * a becomes æ except before nasals, a change which probably took place around the early 5 th century. This process is responsible for the fact that although both Old English and Old High German show the form mann 'man', this is in contrast with Old English dæg 'day' and Old Frisian deg versus Old High German tag and Gothic dags (Lass 1994:42; he reconstructs Anglo-Frisian mainly on the strength of this shared feature). The other characteristic feature, which Frisian has carried on a step farther than English, is the assibilation of velars before front vowels. This last can be seen in the contrast between German Kirche, English church, and Frisian tserke, or German Käse, English cheese, and Frisian tsiis. Although a few Frisian words are preserved in the Latin manuscripts of Traditiones Fuldenses, dating from the end of the 8 th century, and Lex Frisionum, from 802 ad, and there is some onomastic material in the Werden Cadestral Rolls of the late 10 th century, the earliest written texts of Old Frisian only go back to the latter part of the 13 th century (Markey 1988:41,54). (footnote 2) The strongest surviving descendant of Old Frisian is West Frisian, spoken in the Dutch province of Friesland where it has the status of an official minority language. It is commonly divided into a number of dialects and sub-dialects, with various degrees of mutual intelligibility. These modern West Frisian dialects, the East Frisian of Saterland, and the North Frisian of the Jutland peninsula and nearby islands are not mutually intelligible. In fact, even though West Frisian, East Frisian, and North Frisian are often referred to as "dialects" (e.g., Baldi 1983:126), as Ruhlen (1987:60) points out, these three "sharply divergent dialects... no doubt [would be considered] distinct languages if the criterion of mutual intelligibility were rigorously applied." Their divergent evolution can be attributed to their geographical separation from each other, accompanied by a lack of contact between their speakers over the centuries. While the political and administrative control of Friesland passed from Frisian to Dutch hands in the 12 th through 15 th centuries, for the most part this had little effect on daily life in the province of Friesland itself. There was no great migration of Frankish-language speakers through Frisian territory here. In the towns such as Leeuwarden, Dokkum, and Drachten, the Frisian merchants remained to supply the new Dutch administration, and no doubt many clerks stayed on in administrative positions which were now controlled by the Dutch. It was to their economic benefit to learn to communicate with the Dutch speakers, and a Dutch-Frisian creole, known in modern Dutch as stadsfries and in Frisian as stedsfrysk or stedsk, developed in the larger metropolitan areas. Stadsfries has been characterized as "Hollands [the dialect of the province of Noord-Holland- JH] influenced by Frisian... but also a Frisian dialect deliberately cultivated in the direction of Hollands" (De Vries et al. 1993:231). The use of stadsfries did not spread beyond the province of Friesland and did not affect the development of standard Dutch, so I will not be discussing it further. Then as now, most of the province of Friesland was rural, and its language and affairs did not concern the rest of the country much. But the language that was spoken across the inland sea, in the province of Noord-Holland, does matter in this discussion, because unlike the province of Friesland, Noord-Holland and its great port city of Amsterdam became extremely powerful both economically and politically over the next centuries. Its importance lingers on into our own time: even those English-speakers who are well aware that the official name is 'The Netherlands' still refer to the country as 'Holland'.(footnote 3) The northern portion of the province of Noord-Holland is still called West Friesland, evidence of its earlier status as a Frisian and Frisian-speaking area. (footnote 4) And so it is an originally Frankish dialect, Hollands, laid upon a solidly Frisian substrate, which became the basis for Algemeen Beschaafd Nederlands (ABN), modern standard Dutch (Donaldson 1983:13).
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