Regional Dossier: North Frisian in German schools – voluntary work and limited to primary education

North Frisian education is always voluntary and most often restricted to primary school level. The language is also included in a few pre-school care institutions in Nordfriesland. Fortunately, in 2023, the Nordfriisk Liirskap was founded as an institution to develop educational material, support North Frisian education, and promote the language in general. This is seen as a game changer.
 

'The North Frisian language in education in Germany (4th Edition)'

Lena Terhart, together with the Mercator Regional Dossiers editorial team, has compiled a new edition of the Regionla Dossier on the North Frisian language. Terhart is a linguist specialised in language documentation, linguistic typology, and sociolinguistics of small languages. Since 2019, she has been working at the Nordfriisk Instituut, where she has published two grammars on Frisian (with Arfsten & Paulsen-Schwarz, 2021). Since 2023, she has been the head of the department Nordfriisk Liirskap, which is responsible for the development of Frisian teaching materials and language promotion among other things.

The Regional Dossier 'The North Frisian language in education in Germany (4th Edition)' provides information on:

- educational statistics, such as the number of bilingual schools, percentage of children learning North Frisian, and teachers' language skills;
- policies regarding education in and about North Frisian;
- the structure of the education system in the area;
- speaker numbers of the North Frisian language; and
- institutions supporting North Frisian.

This is the fourth edition. The first (1997), second (2007), and third (2015) editions of this Regional Dossier were written by Dr Alastair G.H. Walker of the Department of Scandinavian Studies, Frisian Studies and General Linguistics of the University of Kiel, Germany.

Download

You are free to download and print Mercator's Regional Dossiers for personal, non-commercial use, provided that the extract is followed by a complete reference to Mercator European Research Centre on Multilingualism and Language Learning.

Organisations or institutions that would like to print the dossiers by a local publisher in their country may request a publisher's file (containing crop marks etc.). Publisher's files are available for some of the dossiers, though not all.

To the Regional Dossier series: The North Frisian language in education in Germany (4th Edition) >>>