World Language Map

Where is Northern Frisian spoken?

Northern Frisian (Nuurdfresk) is an Indo-European language, spoken in Denmark and Germany. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Northern Frisian is spoken

Northern Frisian is spoken in 2 countries: Denmark and Germany.

Country
Denmark
Germany

On the map, Northern Frisian is drawn as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18613195), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Northern Frisian.

How many people speak Northern Frisian?

Wikidata gives about 10,000 speakers (Ethnologue, 1976). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Shifting. Glottolog lists it as shifting: the youngest speakers are adults, and children are growing up speaking another language.

Where Northern Frisian sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Northern Frisian as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Indo-European
  2. Classical Indo-European
  3. Germanic
  4. Northwest Germanic
  5. West Germanic
  6. North Sea Germanic
  7. Anglo-Frisian
  8. Frisian
  9. Northern Frisian

Related languages

Other languages in the Frisian group:

More about Northern Frisian

Codes: ISO 639-3 frr, Glottolog nort2626. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Northern Frisian

Where is Northern Frisian spoken?

Northern Frisian is spoken in Denmark and Germany. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Northern Frisian?

Wikidata gives about 10,000 speakers (Ethnologue, 1976). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled.

Which language family is Northern Frisian in?

Glottolog places Northern Frisian in the Indo-European family, in the branch Classical Indo-European, Germanic, Northwest Germanic, West Germanic, North Sea Germanic, Anglo-Frisian and Frisian.

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