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| Old Frisian | |
|---|---|
| Frīsesk | |
 A page of the Brokmerbrief (1345) | |
| Region | Frisia (modern-day Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and Southern Denmark) |
| Ethnicity | Frisians |
| Era | 1275 to c. 1600 |
Early form | |
| Dialects |
|
| Latin script | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | ofs |
ofs | |
| Glottolog | oldf1241 |
Old Frisian was a West Germanic language spoken between the late 13th century and the end of 16th century. It is the common ancestor of all the modern Frisian languages except for the Insular North Frisian dialects, with which Old Frisian shares a common ancestor called Pre–Old Frisian or Proto-Frisian. Old Frisian was spoken by contemporary Frisians who comprised a loose confederacy along the North Sea coast from around modern-day Bruges in Belgium to the Weser in modern-day northern Germany, dominating maritime trade. The vast majority of the surviving literature comprises legal documents and charters, though some poetry, historiographies, and religious documents are attested as well.
Old Frisian was closely related to and shared common characteristics with the forms of English and Low German spoken during the period. Although earlier scholarship contended that Frisian and English had a closer relationship to each other than to Low German, this is no longer the prevailing view. Old Frisian evolved into Middle Frisian around the turn of the 17th century, being largely pushed out by the emergence of Middle Low German as the language of trade in the North Sea. Scholars have argued that the term "Old Frisian" is somewhat misleading, since Old Frisian was contemporary with other Germanic languages during their "Middle" period, such as Middle English and Middle High German.
Morphologically, Old Frisian generally marked for four cases, three grammatical genders, and two tenses, though more complex syntactic functions could be achieved through periphrastic constructions. Its vocabulary comprised a variety of origins including loanwords from Celtic and Slavic languages. Following the Christianization of the Frisians, Latin loans and calques became increasingly common. Word order in Old Frisian was varied; although its typical constituent word order was subject–object–verb, many different word orders are attested in the surviving texts.
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