Speakers
Most speakers of West Frisian live in the province of Friesland in the north of the Netherlands. This province was formerly officially called Friesland, but officially changed its name to Fryslân in 1997. The province has 643,000 inhabitants (2005); of these 94% can understand spoken Frisian, 74% can speak Frisian, 75% can read Frisian, and 26% can write it.
For over half of the inhabitants of the province of Friesland, 55% (c. 354,000 people), Frisian is the native language. In the central east, Frisian speakers spill over the province border, with some 4,000–6,000 of them actually living in the province of Groningen, in the triangular area of the villages Marum (Frisian: Mearum), De Wilp (De Wylp), and Opende (De Grinzer Pein).
Also, many Frisians have left their province in the last sixty years for more prosperous parts of the Netherlands. Therefore, possibly as many as 150,000 Frisian speakers live in other Dutch provinces now, particularly in the urban agglomeration in the West, and in neighbouring Groningen and newly reclaimed Flevoland.
In addition, there is a surprisingly large Frisian diaspora abroad, with Friesland having had in relative terms the highest percentage of emigrants of all Dutch provinces between the Second World War and the 1970s. It is estimated that there may be as many as 80,000–100,000 Frisian speakers scattered around the world, with the largest concentrations located in Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. Therefore, the total number of Frisian speakers in the world today may be as high as 600,000. The West Frisian surname perhaps most familiar to Americans is Dykstra.
Apart from the use of Frisian as a first language, it is also spoken as a second language by about 120,000 people in the province of Friesland.
Read more about this topic: West Frisian Language
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