Diachronica 29:1 (2012), 98–115. doi 10.1075/dia.29.1.04smi issn 017–4225 / e-issn 159–9714 © John Benjamins Publishing Company Review article / Rapport critique / Forschungsbericht Old Frisian Renewed interest in an ‘old’ Germanic language* Laura Catharine Smith Brigham Young University For a century, Old Frisian has largely remained in the shadows of its Germanic sister languages. While dictionaries, concordances, and grammars have been readily and widely available for learning and researching other Germanic lan- guages such as Middle High German, Middle Low German and Middle Eng- lish, whose timelines roughly correspond to that of Old Frisian, or their earlier counterparts, e.g., Old High German, Old Saxon and Old English, few materials have been available to scholars of Old Frisian. Moreover, as Siebinga (Boutkan & Siebinga 2005: vii) notes, “not even all Old Frisian manuscripts are avail- able as text editions” 1 making the production of comprehensive core research materials more difficult. Consequently, what materials there have been, e.g., von Richthofen (1840), Heuser (1903), Holthausen (1925), and Sjölin (1969), have typically not taken into consideration the full range of extant Old Frisian texts, or have focused on specific major dialects, e.g. Boutkan (1996), Buma (1954, 1961). is has leſt a gap in the materials available providing an opportunity for Old Fri- sian scholars to make substantial contributions to the field by filling these gaps. In the past decade, numerous important works on Old Frisian have appeared, including Boutkan & Siebinga’s (2005) Old Frisian Etymological Dictionary, Munske’s (2001) Handbook of Old Frisian Studies, and more recently Bremmer et al.’s (2007) Advances in Old Frisian Philology (a special issue of Amsterdamer Beiträge zur Älteren Germanistik). Including authors from Great Britain, North America and Italy, this last volume shows that interest in Old Frisian spills beyond the traditional geographic borders of the Netherlands and Germany where the * On the occasion of Altfriesisches Handwörterbuch by Dietrich Hofmann & Anne Tjerk Pop- kema (Heidelberg: Winter, 2008) and An Introduction to Old Frisian: History, grammar, reader, glossary by Rolf H. Bremmer, Jr. (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009). 1. e Fryske Akademy is working to provide online access to the earliest Old Frisian texts up to modern texts. A prototype of the Language Database of the Frisian Language has already been launched (www.fryske-akademy.nl/tdb) with an aim to complete the project by 2013.