Project description

Sater Frisian, which is spoken in the north-west of the district of Cloppenburg in Lower Saxony, is the last remaining variety of East Frisian and one of the most endangered minority languages in Europe. Historically, Sater Frisian has never had significantly more than 2500-3000 speakers. The current threat situation arises from the fact that Sater Frisian, which is spoken almost exclusively within the family, with neighbours and among close friends, is competing with High and Low German and is showing a dramatic decline in transmission to the younger generation.

The project is looking for new ways to assess the vitality of Sater Frisian, focussing on factors that could hinder the establishment of this language as a family language. The starting point is the assumption that for a minority language acquired in a multilingual context, linguistic competence alone is not sufficient to ensure its intergenerational transmission. An equally important factor is likely to be the cognitive burden associated with the use of this language. If the use of a minority language is accompanied by an increased cognitive load, the likelihood of this language being established as the family language is likely to decrease despite existing language competence. To record the cognitive load when using Sater Frisian and its contact languages, acoustic measures of voice quality and fluency are collected, which have proven to be reliable indicators of increased cognitive load in psychological research as well as in multilingualism and foreign language research. Special attention will also be paid to the relationship between cognitive load and age, language competence, language dominance and the social and linguistic relationships of speakers with other members of their local language community.

New paths will also be taken in the context of data collection. Instead of a representative survey and a public call for participation, which primarily attracts speakers who consider themselves to be sufficiently competent, the aim is to systematically tap into family groups that may be spread across one or more households. Such an approach not only allows a broader range of competences to be recorded, but also the identification of structural characteristics of the family networks, including the communicative networks constituted by interactions between the network members in one or more languages. With this analysis, the project should provide valuable information for future language protection measures. The project will also provide extensive audio data that can be used to train AI-supported dialogue systems for language teaching and revitalisation purposes.