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 result of Christianization. Word order in Old Frisian was varied; although its typical constituent word order was subject–object–verb, many different word orders are attested in the surviving texts.
Old Frisian is the common ancestor of all modern Frisian languages except for the Insular North Frisian languages, with which Old Frisian shares a common ancestor called Pre–Old Frisian or Proto-Frisian. Old Frisian was closely related to and shared common characteristics with the forms of English and Low German spoken during the period. Scholars have argued that the term Old Frisian is somewhat misleading, since Old Frisian was contemporary with other Germanic languages during their "Middle" period, such as Middle English and Middle High German. Although earlier scholarship contended that Frisian and English had a closer relationship to each other than to Low German, this is no longer the prevailing view.
By the 15th century, use of Old Frisian had begun to decline as the language was gradually displaced by Middle Low German as the language of trade in the North Sea. In the mid-16th century, a century-long internal conflict between two competing factions led to Frisia's subjugation by the Duchy of Saxony, which further displaced the language with Early Modern Dutch as the language of administration. No original Old Frisian compositions occur at all after 1450 and the last known work in the language was created in 1547, though writings made shortly thereafter suggest the Old Frisian used was probably already archaic by that point. By around the turn of the 17th century, the language is considered to have fully evolved into Middle Frisian, where it persisted mostly as a rural vernacular language.
Classification Old Frisian was a member of the West Germanic language family, a subfamily of the larger Germanic languages. It is classified as an Ingvaeonic language along with Old English and Old Saxon.
Periodization The periods of the Frisian languages are traditionally divided into Pre–Old Frisian (before 1275), Old Frisian (1275–1550), Middle Frisian (1550–1800), and modern Frisian (1800–present), though these dates vary among scholars. Trask, for example, puts the end of the Old Frisian period around 1600, while suggests it ends about a hundred years earlier. Some scholars, such as , have argued that there is no reason to demarcate them this way and that these periods are more in line with literary periods than linguistic change. Despite its name, Old Frisian was contemporary with Middle Dutch, Middle English, and both Middle High and Middle Low German, though there is some overlap with Old Norse. In general, Old Frisian manuscripts are notably conservative despite their later date.
According to De Haan, what is referred to as "Old Frisian" should really be called "Middle Frisian" and what is called "Middle Frisian" should be referred to as "Early Modern Frisian". De Haan argues that the current nomenclature is misleading and confusing because it incorrectly suggests that Old Frisian is contemporary with other "Old" Germanic languages such as Old English and Old Saxon. The British Old English scholar Alistair Campbell expressed similar views, arguing that the Frisian spoken between the 14th and 16th centuries is better described as "Middle Frisian". In some contexts, the term "Old Frisian" may also refer to what is called either "Pre–Old Frisian" or "Proto-Frisian", or both the Pre–Old Frisian and Old Frisian periods collectively. Frederik Hartmann, for example, cites Rolf Bremmer's analysis of Pre–Old Frisian sound changes but refers to the language as "Old Frisian". Old Frisian legal scholars typically view The Seventeen Statutes () as the first Old Frisian law text, though it is traditionally considered to be an early 11th-century text and at the very latest probably an early 13th-century one.
Bremmer argues that the origins of the "Old" terminology are based on the perception that scholars who study older historical periods are held in higher esteem. He writes that the view of those attempting to give it the "Old" terminology hope that "its antiquity will add to its prestige", though he acknowledges that the nomenclature is functionally "arbitrary". Ultimately, Bremmer sides with the application of "Middle" to this period except for the two Riustring Codices – dated to and 1327, respectively – based on vowel quality in unstressed syllables, itself based on agreed-upon criteria going back to the work of Jacob Grimm.
In general, Old West Frisian manuscripts are attested more recently as compared to Old East Frisian ones; while most Old West Frisian texts are dated to around 1450 to 1525, their Old East Frisian counterparts are typically dated to between 1300 and 1450. In part for this reason, the Old Frisian period is sometimes further divided into "Classical Frisian" and "Post-Classical Frisian", demarcating Old West and Old East Frisian, respectively, as the characteristics differentiating them may be more based on timing than location. In corpora from around the region between the Lauwers and the Ems, for example, some verbal formations are more reminiscent of those traditionally associated with Old West Frisian despite being grouped as clear members of the traditional Old East Frisian dialect group. However, these overlaps may have been the result of several reference documents being shared across the Frisian territories by different scribes and there is some question as to whether the legal documents of these codices were necessarily discovered in the area in which they had jurisdiction. Under this approach, the Classical Frisian period occurred between the 12th and 14th centuries, and is defined by a shared legal tradition on both sides of the Lauwers, while the Post-Classical period is characterized by the erosion of case markers, the complete collapse of the dative–accusative distinction in pronouns, and the growing influence of Dutch in Old West Frisian and Low German in Old East Frisian.
Dialects Old Frisian was composed of several dialects. The main division was between Old West Frisian and Old East Frisian, based on their position in relation to the Lauwers river. This divide predated the Old Frisian period as there is evidence that it was split on this basis as early as the 8th century. The linguistic phylogeny – that is, the relation of these varieties to each other through linguistic descent – is described below:
This division was not solely linguistic; the divide was also jurisdictional and ecclesiastical. The diocesan divisions are nearly identical to the dialectal divisions. Old West Frisian, largely coterminous with the Diocese of Utrecht, was divided into two dialects: the southwestern dialect in and around Westergoa and the northeastern dialect in and around Eastergoa. These dialects later developed into a continuum after the sea arm which divided them began to be reclaimed around 1100. Old East Frisian was divided twice as well: Old Weser Frisian in the Diocese of Bremen and Old in the Diocese of Münster. During the period of Old Frisian, the dialect which later became North Frisian is not attested. Stiles states that both varieties of North Frisian – Insular and Mainland – are ultimately descended from an Eastern Frisian ancestor.
The descendants of Old Weser Frisian – also known as Riustring Old East Frisian – are Wangerooge, Wursten, and Harlingerland Frisian, all of which are now extinct. Old Weser Frisian is attested in two full manuscripts, known as the Riustring Codices, and two fragments. Whether the Old Weser Frisian attested in these documents is the direct ancestor of the Wangerooge or Wursten variants or rather an extremely close relative is a matter of some debate; Stiles argues that the documents' language is closely related to the two but distinct from them, while Bremmer categorizes them as direct descendants. Old Ems Frisian is the ancestor of the now-extinct Emsingo, Brokmerland, and dialects, as well as the still-extant Saterland Frisian, its only living descendant. Old West Frisian later developed into the modern West Frisian language.
Unlike their Mainland counterparts, the Insular North Frisian languages are not descended from Old Frisian. Instead, they share a common ancestor in Pre–Old Frisian, diverging around the late 7th or early 8th centuries.
Relationship with English
Traditionally, English and the Frisian languages were widely regarded as closer to each other than to any other Germanic language. The German linguist Theodor Siebs is commonly associated with popularizing this affinity and is credited with coining the term Anglo-Frisian languages in his 1889 dissertation entitled ('On the History of the Anglo-Frisian Languages'). The English philologist Henry Sweet, however, is considered the "father of the Anglo-Frisian hypothesis", articulating the concept as early as 1876. Observations about the close relationship are much older than the 19th century, however; it is likely that Anglo-Saxon missionaries during the 7th and 8th centuries saw the two languages as closely related. Datings proposed for a common ancestor of the Anglo-Frisian languages estimate that it was probably fully formed by the 4th or 5th century, diverging shortly thereafter.