Folkspraak


Folkspraak is an incomplete zonal constructed language based on Germanic languages and intended to be easy to learn for any native speaker of a Germanic language, making it suitable to be a sort of lingua franca amongst the Germanic languages community.
The project's development took place mostly online in a Yahoo group, though disagreements about grammar and orthography means that there are several different versions or "dialects". Disagreement occurs even over which source languages to use, so that only some developers draw from Frisian, Low German and Norwegian Nynorsk, next to the usual source languages of English, Dutch, German, Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, and Swedish.

Phonology

Data from:

Consonants

Vowels

Orthography

Folkspraak alphabet is identical to the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Double consonants and consonant groups signalize short vowels. The represents in front of front vowels and in any other position. The digraphs and represent the same pronunciation as and, respectively.

Grammar

Morphology

Folkspraak has no adjectival or verbal variation. Nouns made from adjectives as well as infinitives end in -e as in de andere and have. There is no distinction between adjectives and adverbs.
There is no grammatical gender or cases except with personal pronouns: si, hi, ik, mi.
The plurals of nouns are made with -e or, if a noun ends with an unstressed syllable, with -s. Mann, manne, auto, autos.

Syntax

The basic word order is subject–verb–object. Questions are made by inversion to VSO.

Samples

The Lord's Prayer in several Folkspraak varieties/dialects: