Languages

The Frysian Language

In the novel, Frysian is normal English with some letters replaced. In reality, Frysian and English are close related languages.

This can be explained by the ancient Dutch word Vriesland and it’s Frysian counterpart: Fryslân. Frysian doesn’t know the letter V, so it is replace by an F. A lot of long “i” sounds (the Dutch “ie”) are replaced by an y in Frysian. To make it more foreign, all “i”s have been replaced by an “y”. Please do notice that the y is not the same as the Dutch letter “ij”! Finally, the ^ is placed on the a because the d fails. In the novel, all “a”s bear a ^.
A well known Frysian word is tsiis. It means cheese and is pronounced as “cheese”. I could have replaced the “ch” with “ts” and “ee” with “ii” but that would make it all mostly unreadable.
Another word is fierljeppen (to leap far, farleap, the similarity to English is clear again). What we see here, is the typical “lj” sound. This can be used as well in our post-war Frysian language, by placing a j behind all “l”s that are followed by a vowel.

Short replacement table to write fake Frysian:

Original	... becomes
v	f
i	y
a	â
ch	ts
ee	ii
l+vowel	lj+vowel

The language of the Netherlands

To make a difference between Holland-Dutch and Netherlands-Dutch, in the novel the English that is supposed to be Netherlands-Dutch has been replaced by an Amsterdam kind of Dutch. Many Dutch VIPs on TV come from Amsterdam and thus shower the rest of the country in their dialect.
They tend to soften the hard consonants and harden some of the weaker ones. The effect is a very sleazy kind of Dutch. In the novel it is done as follows:

the “th” cannot be pronounced by a Dutchman, the “h” is taken from it and only the t remains.
the “s” becomes a “z”, and the “z” becomes a “s”.
the r becomes rolling: rrr
the “ng” becomes a hard “nk”
Many words are written almost phonetic.

The language of Ganjastan

For the few sentences spoken in the Ganjastan language, a basic kind of Azeri is used. Mad Jack is not supposed to understand these sentences, but who knows a bit of Azeri (or any similar language) might find out what is meant. All words have been taken from the Internet and with a bit of switching words halfway meaningful sentences have been made.