Old Frisian

Common card · No. 279449

Old Frisian was a West Germanic language spoken between the late 13th century and the end of the 16th century. It was spoken by Frisians who comprised a loose confederacy along the North Sea coast from around modern-day Bruges in Belgium to the Weser River in modern-day northwestern Germany. The vast majority of the surviving literature is composed of legal documents and charters, though some poetry, historiographies, and religious documents are attested as well. Surviving texts show remarkable uniformity across time and space, evidence of an early standard language for the Frisians. Grammatically, Old Frisian generally marked for four cases, three genders, and two tenses, though more complex grammatical functions could be achieved through periphrastic constructions, where other words may be added to create different grammatical meanings. Its vocabulary had a variety of origins including loanwords from Celtic and Slavic languages. Latin loanwords and calques were relatively common as a...

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