Learn Frisian: A Beginner's Guide to English's Close Cousin

Bûter, brea en griene tsiis; wa't dat net sizze kin, is gjin oprjochte Fries. Butter, bread and green cheese; whoever can't say that is no true Frisian. Legend has it the rhyme was once used to unmask outsiders, and an English speaker can read the first half without a dictionary. That's the hook of Frisian, a language from the north of the Netherlands that is among the closest relatives English has.

To learn Frisian, start from that resemblance, but don't lean on it too hard. Learn the spelling, which uses vowel combinations English doesn't, then the core verbs and the word order, which work much as they do in Dutch, and build vocabulary a little every day. Fifteen to twenty minutes a day for a month covers greetings, introductions and simple sentences about your life. If you live in Fryslân, you'll be picking up some Dutch along the way, because everyone around you speaks both.

Where Frisian is spoken

The Frisian most people mean, and the one Qlango teaches, is West Frisian, Frysk, spoken in the Dutch province of Fryslân (Friesland in Dutch). Roughly 400,000 to half a million people speak it, and it is the Netherlands' second official language, used alongside Dutch in the province's government, schools and courts. Many signs in the province are bilingual: the capital, Leeuwarden, is Ljouwert in Frisian. It's the province of the Elfstedentocht, the 200-kilometer skating race through eleven historic cities, last held in 1997 and still waiting for a hard enough winter.

Two smaller Frisian languages survive in Germany: North Frisian, on the North Sea coast and islands of Schleswig-Holstein, and Saterland Frisian in Lower Saxony. Both are small, with speakers in the thousands, and neither is easy for a West Frisian speaker to follow.

Why Frisian looks like English

Frisian and English both come from the North Sea branch of West Germanic, and they went through some of the same sound changes that Dutch and German didn't. The clearest is in the first four rows below: where Dutch and German kept a hard k or g, English and Frisian softened it. The last three rows simply show how close the everyday words are.

Frisian also kept something English lost. Its informal word for "you", do, is related to the old English "thou". The polite form is jo.

What's hard about learning Frisian

The resemblance to English runs out sooner than people hope, because Frisian grammar is closer to Dutch. The verb comes second in a main clause and moves to the end of a subordinate one, and there are two words for "the", de and it, for common and neuter nouns. Frisian also has two infinitive endings, -e and -en, used in different constructions, and it takes a while before choosing between them feels natural.

The spelling holds most of the trouble. Frisian writes a lot of vowel combinations, ea, ie, oe, oa and ue among them, plus circumflexes on â, ê, ô and û, and some vowels change in plurals and compounds in a way linguists call breaking. There are regional varieties too, Klaaifrysk on the clay lands and Wâldfrysk in the wooded east, with differences you'll hear far more often than you'll see them written.

Then there's Dutch. Every Frisian speaker also speaks Dutch, modern Frisian has borrowed heavily from it, and conversations with outsiders tend to slide into Dutch out of courtesy. You'll need to ask people to carry on in Frisian.

First words, in Frisian and Dutch

Since you'll hear both languages in Fryslân, here they are side by side:

Moai is worth special attention: Frisians use it for almost anything they approve of.