Fering is a dialect of the West Germanic language North Frisian. Of the three Frisian languages, West Frisian (ca. 300,000 speakers in the northwest Netherlands) is least endangered, East Frisian (less than 200 speakers in three villages in Lower Saxony) is moribund, and North Frisian (ca. 7,000 speakers) is acutely endangered. North Frisian itself consist of several mutually unintelligible dialects, the most important division being between Mainland North Frisian (with at least five dialects), spoken in the extreme northwest of the mainland of the German state Schleswig-Holstein, and Island North Frisian spoken on the North Sea islands Sylt, Föhr, Amrum, and Heligoland. Of these, only the dialects spoken on Föhr (Fering) and the neighboring island Amrum (Öömrang) are mutually intelligible.
All dialects of North Frisian are acutely endangered: There are no adult monolingual speakers of any dialect, many speakers are fluent in 3 or more languages, and the number of speakers of the dialects of North Frisian ranges between less than 100 and ca. 2000.
It appears that Fering stands strongest among the North Frisian dialects. It has the largest number of native speakers (1500 on the island plus an unknown number of emigrants especially in New York and Northern California), and it differs from most other dialects in that it is used not just at home but also publicly, especially in the Western part of the island (Westerland Föhr with the Weesdring dialect of Fering).
The Westerland Föhr villages of Taftem, Olersam, and Söleraanj (German: Süderende, Oldsum, Toftum) are considered a stronghold of Fering, and the variety of Fering spoken in these villages is reasonably homogenous. It is the form of Fering as spoken in these villages that is documented in this project.
The purpose of the study which provided the data presented in this poster is twofold:
1. As is customary in dialectological and sociolinguistic studies which aim to document conservative and/or endangered speech forms, the speaker group in the first stage of the documentation consisted of older male speakers of Fering. Consultations of dictionaries, textbooks, and native speaking informants led to the construction of word and sentence lists, which were used to elicit the segmental inventory of Fering in different phonetic contexts (for vowels and consonants), at two speaking rates (for selected vowels), and at two speaking styles (for selected consonants). Additionally, the talkers were recorded reading the fable “the North Wind and the Sun” and the Swadesh word list. The complete corpus (on CD-ROM) can be obtained by sending a request to engosb@hum.au.dk (For samples, click the links below.)
2. The fairly comprehensive acoustic documentation of the sounds of Fering is used as database to address questions of general interest. For instance, how does a language with a large consonant and vowel inventory organize its sound system? Fering has been described as having maximally 29 consonant phonemes with typologically unusual contrasts (dental vs. alveolar vs. postalveolar place of articulation for stops, nasals, and laterals). With respect to the vowels of Fering (15 stressed monophthongs, 7 diphthongs, and 3 triphthongs), the general questions that have been addressed concern how Fering vowels are distributed in the acoustic vowel space, how a language with a large vowel inventory like Fering differentiates vowels that are close in the F1/F2 space, whether consonant-vowel coarticulation affects the acoustic differentiation of vowel categories, and to what extent the implementation of the long-short vowel contrasts is affected by speaking rate. (A paper that addressed these questions was presented at the Eighth Conference on Laboratory Phonology, Yale University, New Haven, 27.-30-6.2002. An article on the vowels of Fering will appear in volume 35 of the Journal of the International Phonetic Association. Please click here to download a pdf-file of the manuscript.)
The files that can be accessed here have all been digitized at 44.1 kHz after low-pass filtering at 20 kHz. The speaker is Ocke Danklef Bohn. (For detailed information on the recording and digitization procedure, as well as sound files exemplifying vowels and consonants of Fering as produced by 10 older native speakers, consult the CD-ROM.)