Does the brain associate positive things with the Frisian language, or rather with the Dutch language? And what about negative things? Dr Hielke Vriesendorp of the Fryske Akademy and Utrecht University asked the help of 400 Frisian speakers, inside and outside the province of Friesland, and 400 non-Frisian speakers to investigate this.
Vriesendorp developed an online experiment, which measures subconscious attitudes towards Frisian and Dutch using a sorting task. The participant is shown pictures and words that are positive or negative, and words that are Frisian or Dutch. The pairing between the pictures and words can show whether the brain subconsciously associates Frisian or Dutch more with positive (or negative) things, thus showing subconscious biases.
The experiment takes about 10-15 minutes and at the end of the study, each participant is shown their own results, which can be used to estimate their own subconscious preference. Vriesendorp hopes for as many participants as possible, in order to gain a fuller insight into the prejudices about Frisian and Dutch, both among Frisians and Frisian speakers themselves and non-Frisians and non-Frisian speakers.
About Hielke Vriesendorp
Dr Hielke Vriesendorp is a researcher at the Fryske Akademy and studies implicit attitudes towards Frisian and Dutch. At Utrecht University, Vriesendorp works as a lecturer in English linguistics and in research methods, statistics and language variation.
Links
- Online experiment (not available on mobile phones)
- Fryske Akademy / participate