THE INTERGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION OF NORTH FRISIAN: PROMOTING MULTILINGUAL CHILD-REARING AND SUPPORTING (FUTURE) PARENTS

Research team: principal investigator: Ruth Kircher, collaborators: Pavlína Heinzová and Katharina Jürgensen

Project description:

With an estimated 4,000-5,000 speakers in the district of Nordfriesland, North Frisian has been classified as a severely endangered minority language. Language policies and planning measures to protect and promote North Frisian focus primarily on language teaching at school. However, to date, there have been no concerted efforts to foster intergenerational minority language transmission in the home.

Intergenerational transmission in the home plays a crucial role in ensuring the maintenance and revitalisation of minority languages. Recent research in other contexts has revealed that

intergenerational minority language transmission is affected by parents’ attitudes towards the minority language itself as well as by their attitudes towards childhood multilingualism. Moreover, recent research has highlighted the importance of parents’ access to resources that support them throughout the process of multilingual child-rearing, especially when minority languages are being transmitted. A distinction can be made between parent-directed resources (i.e. those providing parents with information about multilingual child-rearing) and child-directed resources (i.e. those promoting children’s multilingual development). Knowledge about parents’ language attitudes, their engagement with existing resources, and their desire for additional resources is thus crucial for the development of effective support measures for Frisian-speaking parents in Nordfriesland.

This project investigates these issues by means of a survey aimed at Frisian-speaking parents of young children. Notably, the project focuses on both: parents who decided to transmit Frisian to their children and parents who decided not to do so. A key aim of the project is to find out how parents can best be supported throughout the process of multilingual child-rearing and minority language transmission.

Project participation:

Soon, the questionnaire for this project will be made available here – watch this space!

Project outputs:

Later-on, the publications written based on this project – as well as any other outputs – will be made available here.

The intergenerational transmission of West Frisian:

North Frisian is closely related to West Frisian, which is spoken in the province of Fryslân (Netherlands). In parallel to this study of the intergenerational transmission of North Frisian, Ruth Kircher and her colleagues from Afûk and the Fryske Akademy are conducting a study of the intergenerational transmission of West Frisian. This will allow for a comparison of the two Frisian-speaking contexts, and it will yield overarching results that are pertinent for the maintenance and revitalisation of Frisian on both sides of the Dutch-German border. More information about the WestFrisian study can be found here.