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English grammar on Saterfrisian on Taalportaal

Photo: Kening Aldgillis (Wikimedia CC)

An English-language grammar of Saterfrisian has been available on the grammar website taalportaal.org since Wednesday 13 December 2023. 

The previous eight chapters were written by linguists Eric Hoekstra and Bouke Slofstra of the Fryske Akademy in Leeuwarden, who together with Tessa Leppers have already written two German-language grammars of Saterfrisian. Further contributions will be added in the near future, including a description of the pronunciation of Saterfrisian by linguist Stephen Laker of Japan's Kyushu University. The author team has visited Saterland several times in recent years to talk to people from the language area. This has led to many previously undescribed findings.

Studies
The scientific representative of Saterfrisian, Henk Wolf of the Seeltersk-Kontoor der Oldenburgische Landschaft, - previously working at the Fryske Akademy - , initiated the project and read and commented on all chapters before publication. He is very happy that the grammar is now available. Wolf: "Interest in Saterfrisian is much greater worldwide than many people think. Moreover, many linguists studying verbs, for example, collect information from every language they can find. If grammatical information in English is freely available on the internet, Saterfrisian will be included much more often in cross-linguistic studies in the future."

Technical partner
Besides Fryske Akademy, Seeltersk-Kontoor and Kyushu University, the fourth project partner is the Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal in Leiden, which is responsible for the technical work on the website. The Lower Saxony Ministry of Science and Culture and the Federal Ministry of the Interior made the work financially possible. The website taalportaal.org, published in 2014, is an important source of grammatical information on the West Frisian, Dutch and African languages. About 40 linguists from different countries have contributed to the descriptions of these languages.