Multiple estimates of the Frisian and Low Saxon speaker population size in the Netherlands

Language questionnaires can be used to determine the size of linguistic communities within an area, but these often suffer from bias. In this paper, we
aim to investigate approaches to compensate for this bias. Specifically, we try
to obtain reliable estimates of the speaker count of two regional languages in
the Netherlands (i.e., Frisian and Low Saxon). We distributed a language
questionnaire about a range of topics (e.g., language use, language proficiency, intergenerational transfer, and the language learning context of respondents) through an existing large-scale longitudinal study. This resulted
in 38,500 respondents across the three northern provinces of the Netherlands
(i.e., the provinces of Fryslan, Groningen, and Drenthe) where the two re- ˆ
gional languages are spoken.
The relative prevalence of dialect speakers across the sample appeared
to be unrealistically large, which indicated that the sample seemed to suffer
from sampling bias. Initially, we applied post-stratification to account for differences between ratios in the sample and the population (e.g., for sex, age,
domicile population density, and educational attainment). As this proved
to be insufficient, we focused on an intergenerational transmission approach
instead. Earlier usage estimates were used as reference points, and we estimated regional language use for the generations that followed the earlier
generations.
The results show that the use of Low Saxon is declining with a total
of about 350,000 speakers in 2021 (about 32% of the population), whereas
Frisian use appears stable with a total of about 250,000 speakers (42% of
the population). As these estimates seem plausible when compared to other
speaker counts, we conclude that our intergenerational estimation approach
may be a useful tool to obtain speaker estimates in case the necessary information is available.
Keywords— regional language use, intergenerational transmission, Frisian
and Low Saxon, language questionnaire methodology, sampling bias