The Swede who became the Frisian Pope
Nils Århammar (1931-2022)
Source: Private
Frisian is not a joke, but an old language group in its own right. Its peculiarity attracts scientists from afar. Nils Århammar came from Uppsala. He ended up speaking even the smallest dialects of northern Germany actively. One island in particular appealed to him.
Dhe Frisian between Sylt and Heligoland, Föhr and Bredstedt not only survived the storm surges of the Middle Ages, but so many resisted the temptation to switch to Low German and High German that the North Frisian dialects have survived as an everyday language to this day.
They are taught at school and can be heard on the radio. It is the awareness of an independent West Germanic language, the traditions of life by the sea and the community in the fight against the sea that feeds the resistance and commitment.
In order to research their linguistic culture, however, the Frisians were repeatedly dependent on academic imports from abroad. The academic career of the Swede is exemplary for this Nils Århammar, who dedicated his life to researching the North Frisian dialects.
At the beginning of his career was the Germanist Ernst Löfstedt at the University of Uppsala, who made Frisian his subject and attracted numerous students to this small subject. Århammar began investigating the dialects of Föhr, Amrum and Sylt as early as the 1960s when he worked at the North Frisian dictionary office in Kiel the then only professorship for Frisian in Europe. In 1988 he took over the newly established chair at the Flensburg University of Education and at the same time became director of Nordfriisk Instituut in Bredstedt.
Hairdressing received further help from the north from Löfstedt’s student Bo Sjölin. Initially he worked for many years at the Frýsk Institute at the University of Groningen, before becoming the holder of the first Frisian professorship at the University of Kiel. This is now held by a West Frisian, Jarich Hoekstra. The American Marren C. Fort, who devoted half his life to describing and saving the last East Frisian enclave, Saterland Frisian, at the University of Oldenburg, is one of the most important specialist imports. Without the two Swedes, the American and the West Frisian, things would be bad for the subject in Germany.
Gifted field researcher
Nils Århammar was a gifted field researcher. His passion was the investigative conversation with the dialect speakers in North Friesland. He also mastered the dialects actively and described exhaustively their differentiated diversity and language-historical development. His collaboration on the “Handbuch des Frisisches” (2001), the first comprehensive overview of the subject, was decisive. His authority in the subject contributed significantly to the collaboration of 45 authors from six nations. For decades, Århammar worked with his wife Ritva on a dictionary of Helgoland Frisian. In 2011, the people of Helgoland named him a “meritorious citizen”. The bilingual “Halunder Dictionary” was only recently published as the first result.
Small subjects thrive on the enthusiasm of individuals, often from neighboring subjects. It all began when the legal scholar Karl Freiherr von Richthofen, a student of the Brothers Grimm, published the first Old Frisian dictionary, which has not yet been replaced. We have to thank the Breslau Germanist Theodor Siebs for the first “History of the Frisian Language” (1901).
Nils Århammar, a graduate of Uppsala University, was considered the doyen of his subject for decades between Kiel and Groningen. He died in Bredstedt on January 10, 2022 at the age of 90.