Where Western Frisian is spoken
Western Frisian is spoken in one country: the Netherlands. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.
| Country | Share of population | Estimated speakers |
|---|---|---|
| Netherlands | 4.3% | 764,213 |
Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.
On the map, Western 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 Western Frisian.
How many people speak Western Frisian?
Wikidata gives about 845,000 speakers (Ethnologue, 2014). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.
Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.
Where Western Frisian sits in the language family tree
Glottolog classifies Western Frisian as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.
- Indo-European
- Classical Indo-European
- Germanic
- Northwest Germanic
- West Germanic
- North Sea Germanic
- Anglo-Frisian
- Frisian
- Modern West Frisian
- Westlauwers-Terschelling Frisian
- Western Frisian
Related languages
Other languages in the Westlauwers-Terschelling Frisian group:
More about Western Frisian
- Read about Western Frisian on Wikipedia
- Indo-European languages map
- Languages spoken in Netherlands
- All languages, A to Z
Codes: ISO 639-3 fry, Glottolog west2354. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.
Questions about Western Frisian
Where is Western Frisian spoken?
Western Frisian is spoken in the Netherlands. Unicode CLDR puts it at 4.3% of the population of Netherlands, which is about 764,213 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.
How many people speak Western Frisian?
Wikidata gives about 845,000 speakers (Ethnologue, 2014). 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 Western Frisian in?
Glottolog places Western Frisian in the Indo-European family, in the branch Classical Indo-European, Germanic, Northwest Germanic, West Germanic, North Sea Germanic, Anglo-Frisian, Frisian, Modern West Frisian and Westlauwers-Terschelling Frisian.