Written by Dyami Millarson and Ken Ho

Looking back on 2018, it has been a fruitful year. It was a unique year due to Leeuwarden-Fryslân Cultural Capital of Europe 2018. This year presented unique opportunities for promoting local culture. Since 2016 we have been very focused on the link between culture and language. So for 2018 we decided to promote the 3 severely endangered Frisian tongues that are spoken within the Kingdom of the Netherlands: Aasters, Hielepes and Eilauners. We succeeded in doing so by learning to speak and write these languages ourselves. We consider the 3 tongues to be Anglo-Frisian world heritage and we believe their preservation is essential for our human knowledge, progress and science. It is also a matter of human dignity and respect which may foster global understanding for different worldviews. Anglo-Frisian plurality matters.

Our new year resolutions are:

• We want to do 3 major language projects in Europe: We want to learn East Frisian, North Frisian and Elfdalian in 2019.
• We want to improve our command of the German and Swedish tongues for our European 2019 projects: We will practise our reading, writing, listening and speaking skills.
• We want to be able to use 3 Low Saxon languages from the Netherlands fluently: We want to study Gronings, Drents and Stellingwerfs meticulously for connecting people and sharing knowledge.
• We want to investigate the pronunciation of Aasters, Hielepes and Eilauners: we wish to make sound recordings of elderly speakers.
• We want to increase the productivity on the blog: We hope to produce articles of much higher quality, and we hope to produce more articles than before. We want to keep writing articles in endangered languages.
• We want to investigate the usage of technology for the 3 Frisian tongues: We need to explore the possibilities that exist for adopting modern digital technologies for preserving languages. Information and communications technology will be a hot issue for 2019.
• We want to explore new ways to promote the 3 Frisian tongues: Our charitable promotion work continues.
• We want to set up a non-profit organisation to support our charitable ambitions related to documentation, investigation and preservation of terrestrial linguistic, cultural and religious diversity.
• We want to study the idioms of the 3 small Frisian languages. Collecting idioms will be our major documentation project for 2019 apart from making recordings of the pronunciation.
• We want to write 3 reports to document our progress with our language study and research: One for East Frisian, one for North Frisian and one for Elfdalian.
• We personally hope to learn more about healthy diet, supplements, life extension, cuisine, animals and plants, medicine, law, psychology, philosophy, history, biology and geography. We may adopt these interests for our articles.

We are not sure we can achieve all these goals in a single year. However, it is worth trying step by step. Many of these goals are, moreover, meant to occupy our minds for many years to come. Our charity continues, there is really so much to do. We help various communities through our hard work. Productivity is what counts. We have our own personal limitations, but we try our best to contribute to society despite all of our personal limitations. So we know that it would not hurt if but a few of the goals listed above are achieved by us, it is the good intention that matters the most.