Saterland: Three places save East Frisian

Grit Lemke’s current documentary about today’s Sorbs, “Our name is Hanka,” raises questions that he doesn’t answer directly, but does provide clear answers. For example, whether it makes sense at all to put a lot of effort into keeping such narrowly defined languages, which are often struggling with extinction, and the language communities that still support them alive? The film’s answer was clear: yes!

In the area of ​​religious speculation, the story of the Tower of Babel and perhaps the story of Pentecost certainly come to mind. According to the conventional interpretation, when building the tower, God punished people with multilingualism for their iniquity in wanting to reach heaven. At Pentecost, the apostles, seized by the “Holy Spirit,” were able to eliminate the linguistic fragmentation. But Babylon could also mean this message: Do not strive for heaven. Subdue the earth and perceive it as it hands you your language in an orderly manner. Language helps you enter your world and your world experience lives in that language.

Wilhelm von Humboldt believed that “every language has its own unique worldview” and that people live with objects “as the language introduces them to them.” The study of the languages ​​of small language islands confirms this. Language islands have often been able to exist for centuries or even millennia due to their isolation from a dominant linguistic environment.

The smallest language island in Europe is Saterland. These are three communities in the northwest of Lower Saxony, in the Oldenburg countryside, which are administratively combined to form “Saterland”: Ramsloh, Strücklingen, Scharrel with Sedelsberg, a district that was later incorporated, or in Saterland: Roomelse, Struukelje, Skäddel and Säidelsbierich. Of the approximately 15,000 residents there, it is estimated that significantly less than ten percent speak Saterlandic or, as they themselves call it, Seeltersk; in Säidelsbierich there are even fewer.

This language is a variety of East Frisian, which is otherwise considered extinct. There is detailed documentation online and in print about the Frisian languages ​​and their varieties. This also applies to Sater Frisian. But despite a lot of information about this language and “peculiarities of the country and its people” on the Internet, Saterland is “still largely unknown to many people today, even within the Oldenburg area” – a quote from an information brochure from the Saterland community.

In the second half of the 1990s, the Göttingen linguist Dieter Stellmacher carried out a detailed analysis of the situation in Saterland as part of a student research project. He was able to provide differentiated information on different forms of trilingualism among the population. Available are Seeltersk, the regional variant of Low German Platt and Standard German. It’s also surprising that there are even differences between the three places, although this is only limited to a few words.

But there are enough linguistic peculiarities of Seeltersk. For example, grammatically masculine nouns are counted up to three (“aan, twain, träi”) differently than feminine and neuter ones (“een, two, tjo”). Where does that come from? It was already like that in Old Frisian. It can no more be explained in terms of cultural history than the plural of “Ku” (cow): “Bäiste”, which etymologically has to do with “beasts”. The local affiliation is emphasized by mentioning a house name instead of the family name, a peculiarity that also occurs in Upper Bavarian and Austrian villages.

To maintain culture and language, there is the “Seelter Buund” in Saterland, comparable to the Domowina of the Sorbs, and for some time now there has been a “Sater Frisian representative”: the linguist Henk Wolf. He regularly publishes on the peculiarities of Seeltersk and, with others, has developed a new Sater Frisian grammar and language theory. In addition – Saterland does not differ from any language island or dialect area – there is literary work and translations of well-known literature in Seeltersk. Similar to Sorbian, Sater Frisian is passed on early in a kindergarten project.

If you know something about Sorbian in its two varieties (Lower Sorbian and Upper Sorbian), you will find similarities between these language islands. Perhaps most striking is a similarity with Upper Sorbian. The Saterland is Catholic in its traditions and also in the present, in contrast to the pronounced Protestant environment in the Oldenburg region. Catholicism has shaped the communities since the Middle Ages. The Thirty Years’ War brought about a forced Protestant Reformation, to which the monasteries fell victim. But with the Peace of Westphalia, Catholicism was restored to its dominance.

What remains is a Johanniter chapel from the 14th century, a little way to the north of the municipality of Strücklingen. It is a place of pilgrimage that creates identity, especially for local Catholics. The usual Catholic Way of the Cross can be found around the chapel. There is a large and not very light cross hanging there. Visitors can pick it up, carry it past the 14 stages of the story of Christ’s crucifixion and then put it down again. This takes place at Easter organized by the Catholic parishes. Everywhere at the churches, but also on and in other architectural monuments, there are multilingual Sater Frisian, as well as mostly Dutch and German information boards. You can also learn your first Seeltersk vocabulary by just stopping by for a short time.

Not only did Catholicism bring the Sater Frisians together and exclude others, the landscape also had a collective-building effect. The Saterland is surrounded by moors and is itself a moorland. Until the 1950s, the settlements could only be reached by boat. Only then did large-scale drainage begin and, as a result, traffic development with roads and paths. This brought new people into the country. Today we know that the drainage was more of an ecological sin than an economic blessing. The moor never brought wealth, at least not for the moor cutters and small farmers. As a building material, it was more likely to feed traders and builders: “Heeren Bifall is Knächte Oarbeit” is a Sater Frisian saying.

Completely different from Sorbs, Sater Frisians were well-liked under National Socialism. As Frisians, they were considered to be prominent “Aryans”. Nevertheless, in January 1933, two-thirds of Saterland Catholics voted for the Catholic Center Party. This was later corrected by the Nazis in Saterland. However, an anecdote tells of “twäin Seelter” who were denounced and arrested because someone mistook them for English spies because of a conversation they had in Satterland. This error was cleared up, but somehow they remained “foreign”. So there is still a lot to do.