I understand Frisian fluently. I've barely ever spoken it.
Street Cat is made by one person — a linguist, living in Lisbon, trying to find the way back into a language that was all around me and never quite mine. Most of what this thing does comes straight out of that.
Do you speak your mother's mothertongue? And your father's — a fathertongue, if you will.
If the answer is yes, congratulations. Now ask the same of your parents, and of theirs. Somewhere along those lines, the answer turns into no. It usually does. A language stops being handed down, and a generation later it's something the family has rather than something the family speaks.
Mine stopped with me. My mother is Frisian, my whole family is Frisian, and I grew up with Frisian spoken around me and Dutch spoken to me.
A fluent understander
I understand it. Not perfectly — there are words I don't have and accents I lose — but then my family has gaps too, just differently placed. That's what a minority language is like from the inside.
"Fluent" implies speaking, though. You can't really be a fluent understander, even though that is the thing I am and the thing I keep saying I am. I know how the words sound. I know how the sounds are made, because I've heard them a thousand times. I have simply never said most of them out loud. That gap is the strangest part, and as far as I can tell it's nobody's target learner.
Classes were the wrong shape
I went to Frisian class. Half of it I already knew. The other half was new in a way that wasn't about difficulty at all: it was Klaaifrysk, the clay-soil Frisian, and my family speaks Wâldfrysk — the Frisian of de Wâlden, the wooded side of the province. Different corner, slightly different language, and the one being taught was the standard rather than the one I grew up hearing.
So I stopped going. Learning a language you are supposed to already know is its own specific problem, and a beginner's course has no idea what to do with you.
The switch
In Friesland, people who aren't my family don't know my history. So I explain it — my mother is Frisian, I grew up around it. And because I speak Dutch first, that often prompts them to answer in Dutch. Sometimes they'll even move to the formal u instead of je, which puts a polite little distance in the room.
I get it. I'm also bad at speaking a language to someone who isn't speaking it back to me. But language is so much of how two people actually connect, and when you're struggling in it, some of that connection just doesn't happen. I'm half Frisian, and in Friesland I can still be read as an outsider — which stings, because it is a large part of who I am, whether or not I can say it out loud.
Why not just practise with my family
Because of the shame. Not because they'd be cruel — they'd tease me, and mostly kindly, and honestly that's fair: if you're learning something you will get it wrong, and getting it wrong is often funny. But this sits so close to who I am that I don't want to risk that particular flavour of rejection with the people it matters most with.
What I wanted was somewhere to be bad at it in peace. To say the words I already know out loud, badly, a lot, until they're mine. Nobody's face doing anything while I do it.
And distance
I live in Lisbon now, so Frisian doesn't turn up in my day unless I go and find it. Sometimes I do — I watch a lot of media, a lot of short videos, and I enjoy it. But watching is the understanding direction again. The other direction needs somebody, or something, to talk to.
What that turned into
Every choice below is that story, turned into a product decision.
A cat, not a person
There are no people anywhere in this product — no faces, no tutor, no classmates. A cat can't be disappointed in you, can't switch to your other language out of politeness, and won't remember the time you said it wrong.
A place, not a language name
Every cat lives somewhere specific and speaks that somewhere's variety. The version you want is usually the one your family speaks, and that's often not the one a textbook picked.
A dial, not a level
You choose how much of the conversation runs in your own language, and move it whenever you like. "Beginner" is the wrong word for someone who understands everything and has said none of it.
Real things, written down
The films, records, books and dishes a cat brings up are a hand-written list per place, not something a model improvised. A recommendation that turns out not to exist is worse than no recommendation.
Nothing is counted
No grades, no streaks, no nudge saying you've fallen behind. You collect the words you've actually used, and that's the only number here. Disappear for a month and pick it back up whenever.
Small languages ship too
West Frisian and Low Saxon are in the list next to Spanish and German. Neither has a voice yet — nobody has built them a decent one — so for now those cats type. They're there anyway.
Still working on it
I'm not fluent in the speaking direction yet. I'm practising in the thing I built for it, which was the point. I write about language, dialects and the odd business of learning one on Substack.
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