Only a few people still speak Sater Frisian - and they are becoming fewer and fewer. A research team at the Institute for German Studies is therefore now investigating family associations in Saterland that still speak this minority language. They want to find out how alive Sater Frisian still is.
Sater Frisian is one of the smallest language islands in Europe. This last remaining form of East Frisian is still spoken in the municipality of Saterland in the north-west of the district of Cloppenburg in Lower Saxony, which has a population of around 14,000. According to estimates, around 1,500 to 2,000 people still speak Sater Frisian - and the trend is downwards. Project leaders Prof Dr Jörg Peters, Janna Sanders and Dr Heike Schoormann at the Institute for German Studies at the University of Oldenburg are investigating which factors are decisive for the fact that the minority language is being passed on to the next generation less and less frequently. The German Research Foundation (DFG) is funding the project for three years with around 240,000 euros.
Dramatic decline of Sater Frisian
Simply being able to speak Sater Frisian is no guarantee that someone will pass the language on to their children or grandchildren."
Prof Dr Jörg Peters, project leader
Sater Frisian competes with Low German and High German in the district of Cloppenburg. It can almost only be heard in private, i.e. within families, in conversation with neighbours or among close friends. The problem is that those who speak Sater Frisian are passing it on to younger generations less and less often. "Just being able to speak Sater Frisian is no guarantee that someone will pass the language on to their children or grandchildren," says Prof Dr Jörg Peters.
In order to better understand why the transmission of Sater Frisian is declining dramatically, the project team wants to personally interview members of multilingual communities in Saterland and carry out speaking tasks with them to record everyday language use in local family groups.
Tracking down 'language nests' in Saterland
"With the planned project, we are also taking advantage of one of the last opportunities to document Sater Frisian on a larger scale for future generations," says project team member Dr Heike Schoormann. The results can also help to localise 'language nests' within family groups and the immediate social environment in which Sater Frisian still has a particularly strong position. The researchers are using an established method of empirical social research to analyse the data: social network analysis. The majority of the recordings will be made available for language documentation purposes after the end of the project. They can also be used for measures to preserve or revive Sater Frisian - for example to train AI-based dialogue systems for language teaching.
The project is supported by Dr Henk Wolf and Veronika Pugge from the Seeltersk-Kontoor, the Sater Frisian office of the municipality of Saterland, which has set itself the task of promoting, teaching and researching Sater Frisian.
