Wangeroog Frisian

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The Wangerooger Frisian was a dialect of the East Frisian language , the few cases up to about 1930 on the North Sea island of Wangerooge was spoken on the mainland and to the 1950s.

classification

The Wangeroog Frisian belonged to the Weser Frisian dialect group of East Frisian, which was widespread in the east of the East Frisian peninsula , in the former Rüstringen and in the country of Wursten . Wangeroogical was the last representative of these dialects.

history

No written evidence from the island of Wangerooge has survived from the ancient Frisian era. However, with the two so-called Rüstringer manuscripts from around 1300 (the Asegabuch and another legal text) there are two texts from the Weser Frisian dialect area, the linguistic form of which was probably very similar to the Old Wangeroogical.

In the 19th century, the East Frisian language had been almost completely replaced by Lower Saxon dialects for generations . Only in two remote areas in the state of Oldenburg had dialects of the language been able to hold. These were the Saterland , where the local dialect is still alive today, and the island of Wangerooge. For the Wangerooger, their dialect was still everyday language in the first half of the 19th century. It was not until the storm surge of the winter of 1854/55 that the small but stable Wangeroog language community was seriously endangered. Most of the islanders moved to the village of Varel on the Jade Bay after the flood and founded the settlement "Neu-Wangerooge" there. When the island was repopulated a few years later, the former residents did not return to Wangerooge.

Due to the division of the language community, the cheekoogical was no longer viable in the long term. However, the dialect was able to persist on the island for a few decades and even longer on the mainland. The last speaker on Wangerooge died around 1930, and the last two native speakers of Wangeroog Frisian died in Varel in 1950. The language is therefore considered to be extinct.

The lawyer and lay language researcher Heinrich Georg Ehrentraut (1798–1866) from Jever made extensive records of Wangeroog Frisian before the storm surge and published the findings of his research in the series Friesisches Archiv he founded . In the 1990s, extensive unpublished wangeroogical records of Ehrentraut were finally discovered and published in the archive of the Mariengymnasium in Jever. The Wangeroog Frisian is thus extensively documented.

The Halle German professor and dialect researcher Otto Bremer traveled to Wangerooge and “Neu-Wangerooge” in 1898 to study the language. In 1924 he recorded language examples of the dialect, which at that time was already threatened with extinction, on phonograph cylinders . In his last will, Bremer wished that these would be transferred to shellac records, which his successor Richard Wittsack also implemented. Today they are part of the sound archive of the Speech Science and Phonetics Department of the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg . Wittsack also published a short text on the Wangeroog Frisian based on the phonograms in 1938 with contributions by Dietrich Gerhardt and Edgar Fuhrhop.

Linguistic features

The Frisian language on the island of Wangerooge had a number of peculiarities, some of which were probably typical features of East or Weser Frisian dialects in general, but some of which also represented special characteristics of the island dialect. In Ehrentraut's time, for example, the fricatives [θ] and [ð] (“ th sound ”) were still very common. The preservation of full secondary syllables after short stem vowels, which is probably typical for all of Weser Frisian (and otherwise untypical for West Germanic languages ), is clearly visible in Wangeroogic (e.g. schüpu "ships"). Also noteworthy were the consonant gemination , which is rare in Germanic, and the unusual (also cross-word) insertion of / r / between the dentals / t / and / d / (e.g. settert instead of settet "sets").

The verbal system was characterized by the coincidence of the two old Frisian weak verb classes with the simultaneous incorporation of the infinitive ending -i in the root of former short-stemmed verbs. This is easy to recognize from the nominalizations of the verbs; thus the verb spiilii "to play" becomes the spiiliider "player". In addition to the also already extinct North Frisian dialect of the South Goesharde, Wangeroogic was the only modern Frisian dialect in which the uniform ending -t in the present plural was preserved.

literature

  • Temmo Bosse: Cheekoogical i-verbs. Considerations on the verb system of the extinct East Frisian dialect of the island of Wangerooge. In: Us Wurk 61 (2012), pp. 125-141.
  • Heinrich Georg Ehrentraut: Communications from the language of the Wangeroger. In: Friesisches Archiv I (1849), pp. 3–109 and pp. 338–416, Friesisches Archiv II (1854), pp. 1–84.
  • Heinrich Georg Ehrentraut: "Communications from the language of the Wangeroge": the estate of HG Ehrentraut, regarding the East Frisian dialect of the island of Wangerooge; from the archive of the Mariengymnasium Jever; Addendum and addition to the "Mittheilungen" by HG Ehrentraut in the "Frisian Archive" from 1847/49 and 1854 . Edited and edited by Arjen P. Versloot. Ljouwert, Fryske Akademy and Aurich, Ostfriesische Landschaft, 1996, ISBN 90-6171-834-1 .
  • Jarich Hoekstra: R-ynfoeging yn it Wangereagersk. In: Us Wurk 47 (1998), pp. 25-48.
  • Ernst Löfstedt (1932): On the sound history of the dialect of Wangeroog. In: Ernst Löfstedt: Two contributions to the Frisian language history. Lund 1932, pp. 3-33.
  • Arjen Versloot: The cheek-oogical . In: Horst H. Munske (Hrsg.): Handbuch des Frisian . Niemeyer, Tübingen 2001, pp. 423-429.
  • Richard Wittsack (Ed.): Wangerooger Frisian. Study results based on the Wangeroog phonograms of the Phonetic Collection of the University of Halle. Hallische Nachrichten printing house, Halle (Saale) 1938.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Arjen Versloot: The Wangeroogische. In: Horst H. Munske (Hrsg.): Handbuch des Frisian . Niemeyer, Tübingen 2001, p. 423.
  2. ^ Hans-Joachim Solms: Bremer, Otto. In: Christoph König (Ed.): Internationales Germanistenlexikon 1800–1950. Volume 1. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2003, p. 268.
  3. ^ Sound archive - Phonetics , Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Speech Science and Phonetics Department.
  4. ^ André Hüttner: Otto Bremer as Phonetiker - A Contribution to the History of Linguistics. In: Ursula Hirschfeld u. a .: Otto Bremer - pioneer of linguistic phonetics at the University of Halle. Frank & Timme, Berlin 2016, pp. 61–145, on pp. 118–119.
  5. ↑ Arjen Versloot: The Wangeroogische. In: Horst H. Munske (Hrsg.): Handbuch des Frisian . Niemeyer, Tübingen 2001, pp. 428-429.