Samenvatting
Language questionnaires are often used to approximate the size of linguistic communities, which we attempt for two regional languages in the Netherlands: Frisian and Low Saxon. We distributed a language questionnaire about a range of topics (including language use, proficiency, intergenerational transfer, and the respondent’s language learning context) through an existing large-scale longitudinal study (the Lifelines Cohort Study). This yielded 38,500 respondents across the three northern provinces (Fryslân, Groningen, and Drenthe) where the two regional languages are spoken.
Language questionnaires can suffer from bias arising from how questions are presented or information is portrayed. Our sample likely suffered from sampling bias, because the prevalence of dialect speakers was unrealistically large. Initially, we applied post-stratification to account for differences between ratios in the sample and the northern population (e.g., for sex, age, domicile population density, and educational attainment). This only improved the estimates to a limited extent for our metrics (i.e., self-indicated speaking proficiency and use at home), so we used an intergenerational transmission approach instead. Earlier language usage estimates were used as reference points, and we derived estimates for the generations that followed the reference generations.
We found that the Low Saxon speaker population size is declining, with around 350,000 speakers in 2021 aged between 6 and 69 (around 41% of the population in that age range) and 140,000 people using it at home (around 17%). The Frisian population appears stable, with around 250,000 speakers aged between 5 and 60 (62% of the population in that age range) and 195,000 people using it at home (around 48%). As these estimates seem plausible when compared to other speaker counts, we conclude that our intergenerational estimation approach may be used to obtain speaker estimates when required information is available and more common methods are ineffective.
Language questionnaires can suffer from bias arising from how questions are presented or information is portrayed. Our sample likely suffered from sampling bias, because the prevalence of dialect speakers was unrealistically large. Initially, we applied post-stratification to account for differences between ratios in the sample and the northern population (e.g., for sex, age, domicile population density, and educational attainment). This only improved the estimates to a limited extent for our metrics (i.e., self-indicated speaking proficiency and use at home), so we used an intergenerational transmission approach instead. Earlier language usage estimates were used as reference points, and we derived estimates for the generations that followed the reference generations.
We found that the Low Saxon speaker population size is declining, with around 350,000 speakers in 2021 aged between 6 and 69 (around 41% of the population in that age range) and 140,000 people using it at home (around 17%). The Frisian population appears stable, with around 250,000 speakers aged between 5 and 60 (62% of the population in that age range) and 195,000 people using it at home (around 48%). As these estimates seem plausible when compared to other speaker counts, we conclude that our intergenerational estimation approach may be used to obtain speaker estimates when required information is available and more common methods are ineffective.
| Originele taal-2 | English |
|---|---|
| Tijdschrift | Linguistic Minorities in Europe Online |
| DOI's | |
| Status | Published - 1-jul.-2024 |