Intergenerational language transmission of Frisian and Low Saxon in the Netherlands

A major mechanism of language maintenance is transmission from parents
to their children. This mechanism is more stable for the regional language
Frisian than for Low Saxon in the northern Netherlands. In this study, we
assessed the association strength with parental language transmission for a
wide range of variables (e.g., language use, attitudes, and geography) for
both languages. We analyzed questionnaire responses from around 25,000
Frisian and Low Saxon speakers participating in the Lifelines cohort study.
Transmission was strongly associated with whether their children’s other parent speaks the same language and the frequency of language use in different social contexts. Further relevant variables include geographical patterns,
language attitudes, writing fluency, and conservative language use. These
findings suggest that language maintenance for Frisian and Low Saxon could
potentially be supported by language policies that adequately stimulate positive language attitudes, use of the language in different social contexts, and
improving writing fluency.
Keywords— language transmission, language use and attitudes, regional languages, Frisian and Low Saxon, exploratory modeling