Wangerooge Frisian

Wangerooge Frisian, also known as Wangeroogic or Wangeroogish, is an extinct variety of the East Frisian language, formerly spoken on the East Frisian Island of Wangerooge. Descended from the Weser subdialect of Old Frisian, it flourished on the island until a massive storm struck during the winter of 1854–1855, causing the inhabitants to flee to the mainland near Varel. Following the rebuilding of the island a few years later under the administration of the city of Oldenburg, Wangerooge was flooded with non-Frisian speakers and the population who had fled the island adopted the languages native to the mainland. The last two speakers died in 1950 in Varel.

Research on the dialect began as early as 1799, but Wangerooge Frisian remains well-attested largely due to the later efforts of Heinrich Georg Ehrentraut, a German jurist, between 1837 and 1841. Along with his main informant Anna Metta Claßen, Ehrentraut analyzed the dialect and compiled an extensive corpus with speakers in the first half of the 1800s, originally published in two volumes of a short-lived academic journal; a third volume was published in 1996 using Ehrentraut's Nachlaß. Modern attention has been paid to Wangerooge Frisian for its preservation of archaic phonological phenomena, its unique phonology among Germanic languages, and its linguistic innovations over time.