The BA programme offered by the Department of Frisian Language and Culture teaches you more than you'd expect it to!
Our aim is that students of Frisian Language and Culture become trained experts in the fields of minority cultures and languages. By teaching our students about the societal and individual effects of multilingualism as well as focussing on the political ideological background for language planning and policy making, we train students who are equipped for jobs across the world.
Studying Frisian language and culture in Groningen does not only teach you how to speak a European minority language with a long written tradition and close ties to Dutch, it also gives you a unique opportunity to learn about other minority languages and multilingual communities in Europe.
During the three years of our degree programme, students are taught both oral and written skills in Frisian, a regional minority language spoken by almost 1/2 million speakers in the north of the Netherlands. By learning the language and getting access to its rich literary tradition, students gain important insights into the culture and language of this peripheral region of the Netherlands.
It is the comparative approach taken in the programme to put Frisian and Friesland alongside other peripheral regions of European countries that makes the programme so special, however. In our degree you can choose to focus on the similarities between political and cultural movements in Friesland and those in Spain (the Basque country and Catalunia), Scandinavia and the UK, for instance.
Our programme also focuses on the sociolinguistics of minority languages. By taking the courses offered by the Frisian department students gain insights into the politics of language as well as learning more about the social and linguistic variation between speech communities. The individual as well as the societal advantages of multilingualism are put side by side with nations' and institutions' monolingual bias, and students learn to view language planning and policy in light of different political ideologies.
