Urkers dialect

Urkers is the local language of the municipality and former island of Urk, located on the west coast of the Dutch province of Flevoland. Urk was an island until the middle of the 20th century. It was originally located in the Zuiderzee, a bay of the North Sea, which became an inland sea called IJsselmeer when a dam was built to secure the Dutch coast against floods. Inhabitants of Urk had been mostly fishermen and still predominantly make their living from North Sea fishing.

Urkers
Urks
Native to	Netherlands
Region	Urk
Language family	Indo-European Germanic West Germanic Ingvaeonic Low German Dutch Low Saxon Gelders-Overijssels Urkers
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–
Glottolog	urke1234
A dialect map of the northern Netherlands. Urkers is the green bit at the western tip of the pink area at the bottom center.

Urkers is part of the dialect continuum that links Dutch Low Saxon dialects in the North and East of Urk to the Lower Franconian dialects, mainly in the South, West, and North-West of Urk. Standard Dutch, and Afrikaans are also part of the Lower Franconian group. Urkers is considered a part of the Low Saxon group of languages despite the fact that it is quite extreme in that group and both geographically and linguistically at its edge. Lower Saxon has its main distribution in Northern Germany in the federal states Lower Saxony, Schleswig-Holstein, and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. For native speakers from those areas, it is unlikely to understand Urkers well.