Cross the provincial border, somewhere between Veenhuizen and Oosterwolde. Get in at the Dorpssupermarkt and list your ear to the locals. And then conclude: Hey, this is not a Frisian, but just Drents?
You have probably heard of the Stellingwerfs, the variant of Lower Saxon that is dominant in parts of Drenthe, Friesland and Overijssel. You can hear it in the municipality of East and Weststellingwerf (Southeast Friesland), Steenwijkerland (Kop van Overijssel) and the adjacent part in Drenthe. Here we soon call that just Drèents.
The Lower Saxon influence in Friesland yields discussion in its time. This time it was councilor Simon ter Heide who ran the debate in Ooststellingwerf. Ter Heide is angry in response to the refusal of the province of Friesland to exempt to give schools in his municipality for giving Frisian lessons. The municipality previously opposed the province about the placement of bilingual place name signs (Fries and Dutch).
The emotion at Ter Heide is so high that he submitted a request to the municipal administration: Can Ooststellingwerf not belong to Drenthe? After all, many residents do not talk Frisian, but Stellingwerfs.
A few can agree with that on the street in Oosterwolde. “In Friesland they also think that we do not belong:” You live on the wrong side of the Chonger, “they say there.” He also points to the place name signs in two languages that Friesland wanted to place. “They can say more in Leeuwarden.” A man with Pompeblêden on his hat is fiercely against separation from Friesland. “You have a village dialect here, but that does not mean that it still belongs to Friesland.”
If a provincial border is determined on the basis of language, then the Stellingwerven could join Drenthe. You can draw that conclusion after the explanation of Abel Darwinkel. “Stellingwerfs resembles the language from the west of Drenthe; spoken in Smilde, Diever and Dwingeloo,” he knows. “There are differences between Drèents and Stellingwerfs, but they are small. Just like the Veenkolonials sounds different in Drenthe than in Groningen. Stays stuck that the language is practically the same.”
Darwinkel is the director of the Stellingwarver Schreversende and previously worked at the huus of the Taol. When asked why the Drèents is a dominant factor in the Stellingwerven, he declares that the Stellingwerven belonged to Drenthe in earlier times. Not surprising that the language is abandoned. In 1504, the Stellingwerf at the time was eventually assigned to Friesland.
Thanks to peat workers, Frisian influences came back a few hundred years. They brought the Frisian language to the Stellingwerven, Darwinkel explains. As a result, a lot of Frisian is still talking in Haulerwijk, just like in Appelscha. “There you will even find people who talk Frisian and Stellingwerfs,” says Darwinkel about the latter place.
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