The system is quite disrupted. Almost all negative forms have been borrowed from German (Low or High). Person and things can be negated by the phrase nit aan/een ‘not one’ or by nemens ‘nobody’. Some examples are presented below:

Nemens is a calque from Low German, as is clear from the fact that it lacks a positive counterpart (* Emens). To illustrate, consider Dutch iemand / niemand, German iemand / niemand, West Frisian immen / nimmen. Consider the following interesting example, featuring nit aan ‘not one’:

Here the use of wäl ‘who, someone’ would be ungrammatical, though it can be combined with negation in clauses, as in the following example:

The negative quantifier for things is niks ‘nothing’ (perhaps in some cases naan / neen are used).

Time and frequency are distinguished in positive statements, but their negation is usually the same. Negative quantifiers for time are: silläärge (nit) ‘never’ and noait ‘never’. They have been borrowed from Low German, though they are by now well entrenched in the language. This is especially clear for silläärge (nit), which derives from Low German siene Lävensdoage nich ‘his life.days not’. The expression has undergone several baffling Saterland Frisian sound laws, which we cannot trace. Some examples are given below:

The middle example suggests that the expression can also be interpreted as a reinforced negation. Siläärge ‘ever’ is often but not always followed by sentential negation nit ‘not’. An example is given below:

Here silläärge ‘ever’ is not followed by sentential negation but by the negative quantifier for things. Again, it seems a reinforcement of the object quantifier rather than an expression of temporal negation, though that interpretation isn’t excluded. The following example is a true affirmative instance of this fascinating word:

The existential quantifier insen ‘once’ is used in a complex negation in the following example:

It is remarkable that the system of negative and existential quantifiers of Saterland Frisian has been quite broken up. Nevertheless, the same happened in West Frisian, where it was especially quantifiers and other logical words which were replaced with loans from Dutch. This suggests that interferences from a dominant language especially target quantifiers.