Open Access to Frisian Language Material

The Fryske Akademy has a long history, since 1938, of developing printed Frisian dictionaries and word lists, usually with Frisian and Dutch or Dutch and Frisian as the source and target languages, respectively. In the 1990s, the Akademy also began working on digital language resources for Frisian: a language data base, various digitized dictionaries, a digital preferred vocabulary for Frisian and an Online Dutch–Frisian translation dictionary. This paper briefly describes the available digital language resources and how access to them can be improved by means of a yet-to-be-developed application programming interface (API). The Fryske Akademy has three primary user groups in mind: language users, linguists and developers. A list of superlemmas will be compiled to link the information in the different systems. Several examples are used to illustrate the requirements demanded of the API. Underpinning all this are the questions that might be asked by the three user groups of the language resources. Sections 5 and 6 describe the work and projects that are required to implement the API. The final section outlines a roadmap for potential future developments.