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In this presentation we examine variation and change in pronunciation of Frisian and Dutch word final -/ən/ in relationship to bilingualism. Frisian (ISO 639-2 fry) is a minority language spoken in Fryslân, a northern province of the Netherlands, where it has official status next to the national language Dutch. The majority of its speakers are early bilinguals (Dijkstra, 2013; Klinkenberg et al., 2018). Some of the Frisians born before 1960, however, acquired Dutch only at primary school, which could make a difference for the acquisition of variation patterns (e.g. De Vogelaer & Katerbow, 2017; Smith, 2021).
Due to intensive and long-term language contact, the influence of Dutch on Frisian has been growing and affecting both Frisian lexicon and grammar (Sjölin, 1976; De Haan, 1997; Hoekstra & Versloot, 2015; Merkuur, 2021). In this study we will focus on a variable at the interface of morphology, syntax and phonology: the word final suffix -/ən/, of which the realization patterns are different between Frisian and Dutch. In Dutch, the suffix -/ən/ shows up in infinitives, nominal and verbal plurals, and some irregular past participles. It can be realized as [ə] or [ən] in standard speech, varying with region and right-hand context (Goeman, 2001; Van de Velde & Van Hout, 2001, 2003), without any difference in meaning. In Frisian, however, -/ən/ and -/ə/ are different suffixes. As in Dutch, the Frisian suffix -/ən/ shows up in nominal and (past) verbal plurals. However, it does not appear in Frisian infinitives. The presence of a nasal distinguishes past participles and infinitives of strong verbs (e.g., litten ‘let’ vs. litte ‘to let’; Tiersma, 1999; Popkema, 2006; Taalportaal). In Frisian -/ən/ is realized as [n̩], which is in Dutch a marked regional form.
The realization patterns for final -/ən/ are thus: [ə] or [ən] in Dutch, and [n̩] in Frisian. However, given the intense language contact between Frisian and Dutch and the observation that the (complex) Frisian (verbal) system is under pressure, we expect interference between the two systems to show up. This study is the first step in the disentanglement of these (expected) patterns of variation and change.
For this study we analyze all occurrences of the suffix -/ən/ in nominal and verbal plurals and in past participles in both Frisian (ca. 70 tokens per speaker) and Dutch (ca. 60 tokens per speaker), in a reading task of the Boarnsterhim Corpus II (see the poster by Kingma et al.). The 52 speakers, all residents from the Boarnsterhim municipality, are stratified for gender and three birth cohorts. The first analyses show that: (1) in Frisian [n̩] is used in 80% of the cases, showing the old variant is still dominant, but also that 20% are Dutch-like variants, showing interference from Dutch to Frisian; (2) [n̩] shows up in 25% of the cases in the Dutch reading task, showing interference from Frisian to Dutch; (3) in Dutch, younger speakers use more [ə] than older speakers, which is in line with Standard Dutch pronunciation. At the conference, we will present a more fine-grained analysis at the individual level, to understand the interference between the Dutch and Frisian system and see whether it can be linked to external factors as age, gender and type of bilingualism.