Folkspraak

Development history

The project's development takes place mostly online in a Yahoo group, though disagreements about grammar and orthography means that there are several different versions or "dialects". Disagreement occurs even over which source languages to use, so that only some developers draw from Frisian, Low German and Norwegian Nynorsk, next to the usual source languages of English, Dutch, German, Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, and Swedish.

Overview

The idea behind the project is that a speaker of a Germanic language should be able to read and understand Folkspraak in a week and to write it in a month.

The development of the language is similar in its process to Interlingua—to create a word or a grammatical form in Folkspraak samples are taken from all of the Germanic languages and the form common to most of the languages is selected. Reference is also made to previously existing and parallel Germanic zonal constructed languages.

Dialects

Due to the splits and rifts in Folkspraak, numerous independent projects and "dialects" have arisen.

Middelspraak

Middelspraak (also seen as Middelsprake) is a constructed language designed by Ingmar Roerdinkholder, who later became a member of the effort to develop Folkspraak. Middelspraak ended up very similar to Folkspraak, and as such is often considered a dialectal variant. The main differences between the two are in spelling and phonology, Middelspraak being more archaic, and Folkspraak being more contemporarily focused and simple.

Middelspraak is constructed by comparing eight living Germanic languages: English, German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Low Saxon, Frisian and Norwegian Nynorsk; resulting in an intermediate language between Western and Scandinavian Germanic varieties.

Frenkisch

Frenkisch is an independent work within Folkspraak. It is developed by David Parke, a conlinguist.

Nordienisk

Nordienisk is a second independent work within Folkspraak. Its creator is unknown/unrecognized.

Alphabet and pronunciation

Folkspraak alphabet is identical to the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Double consonants and consonant groups signalize short vowels. The ⟨c⟩ represents /s/ in front of front vowels (⟨e i y eu⟩) and /k/ in any other position. The digraphs ⟨th⟩ and ⟨ph⟩ represent the same pronunciation as ⟨t⟩ and ⟨p⟩, respectively. Diacritics are not used.

Morphology

Folkspraak has no adjectival or verbal variation. Nouns made from adjectives as well as infinitives end in -e as in de andere ('the other') and have ('to have'). There is no distinction between adjectives and adverbs.

There is no grammatical gender or cases except with personal pronouns: si ('she'), hi ('he'), ik ('I'), mi ('me').

The plurals of nouns are made with -e or, if a noun ends with an unstressed syllable, with -s. Mann (man), manne (men), auto (car), autos (cars).

Syntax

The basic word order is subject–verb–object (SVO). Questions are made by inversion to VSO.

Samples

The Lord's Prayer in several Folkspraak varieties/dialects:

From Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

All mensklik wesings âre boren frî on' gelîk in werđigheid on' rejte. Đê âre begifted mid ferstand on' gewitt on' skulde behandele êlkên in en gêst av brôđerhêd.

(All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.)