Project description

Sater Frisian, 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 2,500–3,000 speakers. The current threat stems from the fact that Sater Frisian, which is now spoken almost exclusively within the family, with neighbours and among close friends, competes with High and Low German and is seeing a dramatic decline in transmission to the younger generation.

The project seeks new ways of assessing the vitality of Sater Frisian, with a focus on factors that might 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 load 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 becoming established as a family language is likely to decrease, despite existing language proficiency. To measure the cognitive load involved in using Sater Frisian and its contact languages, acoustic measures of voice quality and speech fluency are collected; these have proven to be reliable indicators of increased cognitive load in psychological research as well as in multilingualismand foreign language research. Particular attention will also be paid to the relationship between cognitive load and age, language proficiency, language dominance, and the social and linguistic relationships of the speakers with other members of their local language community.

New approaches will also be explored in the context of data collection. Instead of a representative survey and a public call for participation—which primarily attracts speakers who consider themselves sufficiently competent—the aim is to systematically map family networks, which may be spread across one or more households. Such an approach not only allows for the recording of a broader spectrum of proficiency, but also the identification of structural characteristics of family networks, including the communicative networks constituted by interactions between network members in one or more languages. This analysis should enable the project to provide valuable information for future language preservation measures. Furthermore, the project aims to provide extensive audio data that can be used to train AI-supported dialogue systems for language teaching and revitalisation purposes.