A standard East Frisian dictionary.
Since the end of 2019, our association member Onno Feldmann has been working intensively on the implementation of a standard East Frisian dictionary. For this he uses the guidelines for East Frisian orthography by Holger Weigelt, which were developed in 1975 and revised in 1999. Weigelt criticized the standardization of the East Frisian orthography in favor of a standard Low German, in which East Frisian would lose its complete character as a Frisian-Low German language. We agree with this opinion.
Feldmann’s dictionary, which we support as an association, offers the option of calling up a standardized East Frisian that is realistic in terms of sound. The dialects in East Frisia stand for themselves due to their many phonetic and lexical peculiarities. As such, the dialects in East Friesland differ mainly in a sound shift, which can be easily identified using an example:
mauder / mɑʊwdɚ / – meauder / mɛɑʊwdɚ / – möyder / mœydɚ / – mouder / moʊwdɚ /
According to Weigelt, the most widespread dialect with the sound group au-âu is standardized. There are also small sound shifts. Feldmann tries to standardize here to a form in which there are as few words as possible in the typeface that are spelled the same if they mean different things.
The dictionary currently contains around 83.000 data records (as of July 2023), which contain both individual words and phrases or examples.
The creation will still take some time and some spelling will still have to be put to the test. Nevertheless, the current stand already offers a comprehensive repertoire.
You can find the dictionary here: oostfraeisk.org
