Dutch is gradually becoming the dominant language in Friesland. Frisian is so little spoken that it starts to behave like a second language. The official name for this is Interferent Frisian. It is Frisian that is interspersed with Dutch expressions and Dutch word orders.
The fact that English words occasionally seep into Dutch is because many Dutch people regularly speak or at least hear English. In that sense, most Dutch people are bilingual. And that has consequences for their mother tongue.
Language change through bilingualism is often seen as a two-stage rocket. In the first phase, native speakers acquire some knowledge of a second language. They don't speak that second language well, but they do borrow it from time to time. For example, their second language exerts an influence on their mother tongue, but the influence is not very great. It often ends with borrowing some words. In this phase, Dutch is in relation to English. In the second phase, the influence of the second language is much stronger. But we will only achieve that in Dutch if we all also speak English every day.
In Friesland, Dutch-Frisian bilingualism has existed since the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth century, for example, the Dutch expression 'not of his life' was (never) borrowed as fan syn Leven net. The Frisian word for 'life' is libben, so we can clearly see that the expression is borrowed from Dutch.
Bad Dutch:Bokwerders
In the first phase of language contact, the mother tongue has an influence on the second language, hardly the other way around. After all:a Dutch person who speaks poor English (coal English) is invariably recognized by his Dutch accent or Dutch sentence constructions.
The same used to happen with Frisians who spoke Dutch. In the 1970s, the Frisian writer Rink van der Velde took this linguistic phenomenon as the starting point for a series of humorous columns. He presented those columns as if they were pieces from Bokwerder Belang magazine, the magazine of the association for the village interest of the imaginary village of Bokwerd. In it he wrote a form of Dutch, richly interspersed with Frisian expressions and word orders:the so-called Bokwerders.
Bokwerders sounds Dutch, but has a Frisian grammar and Frisian idiom:it is Dutch-style Frisian, Frisian in a Dutch jacket. An example is I tear myself out of the pipes, to Frisian I skuor my de bûsen út, meaning someone is laughing a lot or having great fun. Nowadays it is difficult to find Frisian speakers who speak such bad Dutch. This first phase of language contact is over in Friesland.
Reverse roles
Today, in the second phase, the roles are reversed. Dutch is the dominant language in Friesland, the language that many people learn as their mother tongue. Frisian is so little spoken that it starts to behave like a second language. Now we find an inverted Bokwerders. The official name for this is Interferent Frieze. It is Frisian interspersed with Dutch expressions and Dutch word orders. It is refreshed Dutch or:Dutch in a Frisian jacket.
An example is Wy moatte mar gean begjinne mei de training, instead of Wy sille mar hast begjinne mei de training, or Because there was a sudden fall instead of Because bumblebees have fallen. Of course there have always been speakers who spoke Frisian well, and speakers who spoke refreshed Dutch. The point, however, is that the speakers of refreshed Dutch seem to be in the majority.
Bad Frisian
One could say that this picture is somewhat simplistic, that two groups cannot really be distinguished, but that everything falls within a spectrum:good Frisian, bad Frisian and everything in between. The nice thing is that research into a concrete language phenomenon shows that, in any case, in the case studied, two groups can indeed be distinguished.
Linguists from Friesland and Nijmegen have recently investigated how the intermediate sound in bookcase and the ending sound in books is pronounced in the Frisian language of young people. The following table shows how the pronunciation is in Standard Frisian, in Dutch and in Interferent Frisian:
| Plural in a sentence | Composition | |
| Frisian (Fr) | Book, with [n] | Bookcase, without [n] |
| Dutch (Holl) | Book(s), without [n] | Bookcase, without [n] |
| Interference Frieze (NE-Dutch) | Book, with [n] | Bookcase, with [n] |
Without going into all the details, we can state that there is a system in the scores, in such a way that we can roughly find the two groups of speakers:speakers of 'good' Frisian (triangles) and speakers of Interferent Frisian (circles). In the first group, the slot-n can be heard clearly in the plural and hardly, if at all, in the composition. The speakers of Interferent Frisian sound the slot-n in both cases. It is not the case that there is a random distribution in the scores.
Two groups of speakers
This figure thus confirms, at least for the phenomenon of intermediate sounds, that we can distinguish two groups of speakers in the case of language change through language contact. When the speakers of 'good' Frisian are still present in large numbers, they occasionally borrow something, but the language remains reasonably intact. This is also the stage in which Dutch is in relation to English. However, when the speakers of 'bad' Frisian are ubiquitous, the language quickly becomes an accent:only the pronunciation and a small part of the vocabulary are then still authentic.
What also stood out in this survey among young people in Heerenveen and Buitenpost was that the majority of young people who speak Frisian at home use the 'good' Frisian variant here. So it is certainly not the case that all younger speakers only speak refreshed Dutch in all respects.