User:ChamithN

Page from the Brokmerbrief written in Old Frisian

Old Frisian was a West Germanic language spoken between the late 13th century and the end of the 16th century by Frisians who comprised a loose confederacy along the North Sea coast. It served as an early regional standard language and demonstrates remarkable uniformity across time and space. The surviving corpus is almost entirely legal documents (example pictured). Old Frisian marked for four cases, three genders, and two tenses, though other grammatical functions could be achieved through periphrasis. Word order varied widely, though subject–object–verb was most common. Middle Low German began to displace Old Frisian as the language of trade during the 15th century and, by the turn of the 17th century, it had evolved into Middle Frisian, a vernacular language constrained to rural areas. It is the common ancestor of all Frisian languages except for the Insular North Frisian languages, with which they share an earlier ancestor called Pre–Old Frisian. (Full article...)