Vocabulary
of the WorldFrisian languages are a closely related group of Germanic languages, spoken by about half a million members of Frisian ethnic groups, who live on the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands and Germany.
Frisian languages are the most closely related living European languages to Old English, but modern English and Frisian are mostly unintelligible to each other.
It has been asserted that fishermen from Great Yarmouth could understand fishers from Harlingen in Friesland. There are similarities to both Dutch, as many Frisian words are borrowed from Dutch, and Danish, as Danish speakers are able to understand some spoken Frisian.
Additional shared linguistic characteristics between the Great Yarmouth area, Friesland, and Denmark are likely to have resulted from the close trading relationship these areas maintained during the centuries-long Hanseatic League of the Late Middle Ages.