The Old Frisian Summer School will be held from 22 to 26 june 2020 in Groningen. Old Frisian. Medieval Language Shifts along the North Sea Coast is organised by Groningen University in partnership with Oxford University and in co-operation with the Frisian Academy, Tresoar and the University of Amsterdam.
Old Frisian is a West Germanic language spoken by inhabitants of the coastal region of the Low Countries since approx. the 5th century. The Old Frisian language area stretched as far as the Rhine/Meuse estuaries in the south-west and the Weser mouth in the north-east. During the Middle Ages language shifts took place both in the south-western area (in favor of Dutch) and in the north-eastern area (in favor of Low German).
At the hand of a corpus of mostly late-medieval law texts and a number of sagas (1100-1550 AD) participants will learn to read and interpret Old Frisian texts and get a good grasp of its grammatical structures. There will be lectures about the various language shifts Frisian experienced over the medieval period when it gave way to Dutch or Low German in formerly Frisian-speaking areas. There will be due attention to the sociolinguistic processes which may have steered these phenomena.
The Old Frisian Summer School will be of interest to BA and MA students as well as PhD’s in the field of Old Germanic languages. More information and registration can be found here.