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Tomorrow there are elections in the Netherlands, and two parties are proposing adding Frysian to that list: https://neerlandistiek.nl/2025/10/kies-voor-taal/ ht
by Vinnl 1y ago
Tomorrow there are elections in the Netherlands, and two parties are proposing adding Frysian to that list: https://neerlandistiek.nl/2025/10/kies-voor-taal/ https://neerlandistiek.nl/2025/10/kies-voor-taal/
Best get to retraining those models.
- rzwitserloot 1y agoNot sure what happened there but your link disproves your statement. Specifically, the link says two things: 1. That 2 parties want to add *limburgish* to the list, not frisian. That's the bottom-right part of The Netherlands, about as far removed from Friesland as you can get (which is the top part of the Netherlands). 2. That one party wants to add Frisian, but, that is a one-day fly party that will cease to exist in a few hours as they will get 0 seats in this election and will presumably call it a day right after. It was a party founded to support one person and that person has quit due to workstress, and is highly unlikely to return as this _was_ his return. Their opinion used to be relevant as they had 13.3% of the seats this past session (and didn't exist before it). But, it isn't here.
- Vinnl 1y agoWhoops yeah, misremembered - didn't reread as I posted the link. Was more of a fun off-the-cuff remark, so didn't spend too much energy on it. But yes, I meant Limburgish rather than Frisian.
- przemub 1y agoEach EU country nominates one official language for the EU, otherwise we'd have Catalan, Breton, Kashubian and many more.
- pasc1878 1y agoWhich country nominates English? The obvious suspects are Ireland and Malta which have nominated non English languages so it is not them.
- gambiting 1y agoWell I can only assume that when UK departed the EU, English wasn't removed automatically even though no country remaining in the EU nominates it as their official language of choice.
- OJFord 1y agoThe UK was not a founding member of the EEC which preceded it, I don't know and haven't easily been able to find out, but it wouldn't be that surprising if the European Parliament already used English as a common language for policy etc. (In fact to strengthen that probability, if it had been say French, when and why would it have switched go English? Just because the UK joined?)
- ranc1d 1y agoIrish and English are both official languages in the Republic of Ireland. Irish is the first official language and English being the second. https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2003/act/32/enacted/en/pdf https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2003/act/32/enacted/en/p...
- pasc1878 1y agoRead the comment I replied to? It says that each country can only request ONE language. And Ireland requested Irish.
- rsynnott 1y agoThey could get Austria to do it, as it presumably has a spare slot.
- outside1234 1y agoThis raises an interesting question. Is there only one dialect of German in the LLM? My understanding is that the German German and Austrian German dialects are significantly different.
- ipsi 1y agoWhen spoken? Almost certainly. But I think they mostly write in Hochdeutsch, especially in formal contexts, at least that I've seen (private chats/etc are a totally different matter), so I don't foresee any major issues there.
- lxgr 1y agoAustrian standard german is slightly different from the German variant, even when written. The differences are pretty minor, though, so it’s very possible to have a relatively long text without being able to tell which one it actually is (especially when potatoes are not referenced in it).
- eru 1y agoWell, even without any government mandates, ChatGPT is very happy to give you lots of dialects of English (and many other languages, too). Just ask for it. Eg it does a passable impression of Singapore's Singlish.
- thayne 1y agoNot a native, but from what I understand, austrian german is pretty similar to what is spoken in southern Germany, but northern germany is significantly different.
- hebelehubele 1y agoMy German teacher always claimed that Swiss German and German German (Hochdeutsch) were so different that she needed subtitles to understand it, and she didn't understand why they weren't considered separate languages.
- piltdownman 1y agoIncluding the nasty political side-show that is Ulster Scots - literally only brought in as a chilling effect 'whataboutism' to diminish support when Irish speakers ask for language rights in Northern Ireland. https://www.reddit.com/r/northernireland/comments/1fivtob/nothing_will_convince_me_ulster_scots_is_a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/northernireland/comments/1fivtob/no...
- pqtyw 1y agoWell Scots is a real language. As much as English or any other. Whether enough people speak it especially in NI to justify it having an official status and such is another matter.
- AlecSchueler 1y agoThis completely ignores the history of published writing in Ulster Scots going back centuries.
- wizzwizz4 1y agoThis is one of those topics where the Hacker News take is unlikely to be correct. There's a lot of strong feeling here, and an outsider would need at least three books to understand the historical context (one of which, afaict, has not been written yet: it's oral tradition only). People closer to the issue are better-placed to gather the necessary information, but again: strong feeling. Most people find it hard to get past that. The most informed person I know is so biased that I don't at all trust their conclusions.
- AlecSchueler 1y agoWhat do you think is the Hacker News take?
- rgblambda 1y agoPart of the issue some people take with Ulster-Scots is that the current official 21st century literature doesn't read anything like the historic literature, which English speakers can easily read and understand. It's often made up of slang terms and archaic spelling, in an attempt to be as different as possible to English. Native speakers have complained that official documents and signage in Ulster-Scots are incomprehensible to them.
- Levitz 1y agoWell, this was 4 days ago, Spain in talks with Germany regarding the addition of official languages: https://www.politico.eu/article/catalan-basque-galician-boost-friedrich-merz-pedro-sanchez-team-up-brussels/ https://www.politico.eu/article/catalan-basque-galician-boos...
- foxglacier 1y agoIf you can't find a common language within your own country, you shouldn't get to be one country.
- victorbjorklund 1y agoGo back and tell the founding fathers of america that. Not everyone in america was english speakers.
- coldtea 1y agoNo, but everyone in the US was made, practically and in some ways officially, to become an english speaker.
- Symmetry 1y agoThey're children were taught in schools that ensured that they learned English but many adult immigrants never learned to speak English. Carnegie Steel used to try to avoid having too many workers with a common language as part of a strategy to make unionization more difficult. And when Norman Borlaug was growing up in Saude, Iowa in the 1920s there were still a lot of older people around who only spoke Norweigen.
- rvba 1y agoI think English was not set as an official language since... Trump? It was the de facto language, but not the official language. What was baffling.
- victorbjorklund 1y ago
- runarberg 1y agoIs English a legacy official language then from the time the UK was a member (I‘m guessing Ireland nominated Irish instead of English). Aside it feels very un-EU to push this limitation, as I was under the assumption that EU was all about celebrating (European) diversity.
- handelaar 1y agoStill an official language, thankfully. Officially, because of Cyprus.
- globular-toast 1y agoWhy Cyprus? Their official languages are Greek and Turkish.
- handelaar 1y agoBecause they also recognise English and Greek's already covered by Greece.
- Muvasa 1y agoMalta and ireland
- adastra22 1y agoBut if you’re only allowed one official language to add to the mix, they’d surely pick Maltese and Irish.
- skissane 1y agoThe history here is more complex than that… originally Irish was not an EU language because Ireland just used English… then as part of one the cycles of EU treaty renegotiation, Ireland successfully pushed for it to be made a secondary EU language… and then later successfully pushed for it to be upgraded to full status… so Ireland actually has two EU languages, their original one (English) and their newer one (Irish). Because the practical reality is everyone in Ireland is fluent in English-around 60% of Irish people can’t even speak basic Irish, and fluent Irish speakers is <10% of the population Also, English remains one of the main working languages of the EU bureaucracy, because for many EU states (especially in Eastern Europe) it is a more popular foreign language than the other two (French and German)-when Czech diplomats need to talk to Spanish diplomats, English is the language they choose. This idea people have here that “each country gets to nominate a language” isn’t how it actually works. The treaties just contain a list of languages, and which languages are in the list is down to diplomatic negotiations not any coherent principle.
- sigmar 1y agoShould be noted- the Netherlands can't unilaterally make changes. Spain has been trying to push for languages to be added and hasn't had luck.
- Vinnl 1y agoHaha I just added it as a fun fact, I don't actually believe folks will need to start retraining things, or that this is likely to be at the top of the priorities list for anyone. Party programmes are aspirational anyway.
- mikrl 1y agoAs a Brit I feel very at home when hearing/reading Dutch and Frisian. It’s a reminder that England and the Low Countries share a lot of close history all the way back to Anglo-Saxon times; of being fishers, traders, burghers and mercenaries moving around the North Sea chasing opportunities, spreading and augmenting languages. “Brea, bûter en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk”
- hopelite 1y agoThat’s because all those languages are all essentially rooted in the languages/dialects of the Germanic tribes. It is why the Dutch get their English name from the German for German, Deutsch; and Nederland (Neder = Low) is German/Dutch for the Lowland Deutsch. I’m sure everyone is aware that English comes from Anglish, i.e., the Angles as in the Germanic tribe. Deutsch is derived from proto-germanic (as best we can tell) þiudiskaz, meaning “the people” i.e., the group of the different self associating tribes. It gets far more interesting in that it seems many of the strong dialects of especially southern Germany, Austria, and England have in fact retained some very old words and pronunciations that were lost in more standardized, conformed, and perverted dialects.
- Freak_NL 1y agoReading something like the Canterbury Tales is interesting as a Frisian, because old English really is close to Frisian — much closer than Dutch.
- ifwinterco 1y agoDutch is funny - when I hear people speaking Dutch I almost feel like I should be able to understand it (but clearly as I've never learnt it, I can't). The cadence and general way it sounds is much closer to English than any other language
- RobotToaster 1y agoIf you've ever read anything written in old English, it's a even closer to Dutch.
- 1y ago
- tecleandor 1y agoAFAIK, they are trying to get Frisian added to the "European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages", not the official language list. They get certain recognition, but they are not official in Europe. For example, just from Spain there are 13 languages on that list.
- trollbridge 1y agoTo be fair to the Frisians, there are around 40,000-80,000 native Irish speakers and 500,000+ native Frisian speakers.
- aprilthird2021 1y agoUnfair comparison, imo. Irish (Gaelic) is a language which was intentionally suppressed for centuries.
- dbspin 1y agoWhat relevance does that have? I'd say it's more important to acknowledge the fact that there are zero Irish speakers who don't also speak English. Including it as an official EU language is an ideological project rather than a pragmatic one.
- aprilthird2021 1y agoBecause there is a cause to revert the intentional damage done to Irish by the former rulers of the land. With Frisian there was no resistance to it. I think official language status helps provide resources to conservationists of various languages. And trying to conserve a language most of the speakers don't care about us a lot different than trying to conserve a language people do care about but we're forced to suppress for many years so have less ability to conserve it
- igravious 1y agoIrish is an official language of Ireland (there is signage and instructions in Irish up and down the Republic) , Frisian is not an official language of the Netherlands to the best of my knowledge Irish is certainly not a robust vigorous language but your 40,000-80,000 numbers downplay it I'd suggest. Here are some statistics from Deepseek Category Region Number of Speakers Source & Year Some Ability Republic of Ireland 1,873,997 (40% of population) 2022 Census Some Ability Northern Ireland 228,600 (12.4% of population) 2021 Census Daily Speakers Republic of Ireland 71,968 2022 Census Daily Speakers Northern Ireland 43,557 2021 Census Native/Fluent Global Estimate ~80,000-170,000 Various Sources Speakers U.S. United States ~20,000+ Estimate
- ginko 1y agoJust do a 50:50 mix of the German and Dutch model weights.
- Vinnl 1y agoOops, accidentally made the model speak Limburgish.