Research theme: Multilingualism and Language Learning
Research team: principal investigator: Ruth Kircher (ECMI); co-investigators: ​​Mirjam Vellinga (Afûk) and Jelske Dijkstra (Mercator European Research Centre/Fryske Akademy); collaborators: Suzanne Dekker (Mercator European Research Centre/Fryske Akademy), Wilbert Heeringa (Fryske Akademy) en Pavlína Heinzová (ECMI).
Duration: 2024-2026
Funding: Research grant from the Province of Fryslân (grant number 02193883)

West Frisian has been classified as a vulnerable minority language. In recent decades, it has therefore received increasing protection and promotion through provincial language planning. As a result, West Frisian now has greater institutional support, it is more present in the media and in other public domains, and it is included in school curricula. Moreover, efforts are made to encourage its intergenerational transmission in the home. Nonetheless, the number of parents who transmit Frisian to their children has not increased significantly since the 1970s.

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 (and the majority language) as well as by their attitudes towards childhood multilingualism. Moreover, recent research has highlighted the importance of resources to support parents who are raising their children multilingually with minority languages – distinguishing 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).    

This project investigates parental language attitudes as well as the use of – and desire for – resources amongst Frisian-speaking parents in Fryslân. Notably, the project focuses on both: parents who decided to transmit Frisian to their children and parents who decided not to transmit Frisian to their children. A key aim of the project is to find out how parents can best be supported throughout the process of multilingual child-rearing.

​​Project participation

The questionnaire for this project will soon be available here.

​​Project outputs

Later on, the research report and other publications based on this project will be made available here.

Partner project

West Frisian, as it is spoken in Fryslân, is closely related to North Frisian, which is spoken in Nordfriesland. In parallel to our study of the intergenerational transmission of West Frisian, Ruth Kircher (the principal investigator of this project) is conducting a study of the intergenerational transmission of North 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 North Frisian study can be found ​here.