This research would have been impossible without informants who were willing to translate the story of ‘the Northwind and the Sun’. We wish to thank G. Blom (Hindeloopen), J. Spoelstra (Hijum) and W. Visser (Oosterbierum). All of them are affiliated with the Fryske Akademy in Leeuwarden. We also thank S. van Dellen (Wetsens), T. de Graaf (Leeuwarden), F. Postma (Tjerkgaast) and O. Vries (Westergeest), all of them employees of the University of Groningen. We thank J. Allen (England), A. Mikaelsdóttir (Iceland), Vigdis Petersen (the Faroes), R. Kraayenbrink (the Netherlands), K. Sjöberg (Sweden) and R. Schmidt (Germany). We are also very grateful to Jørn Almberg for making available the recording of Lillehammer (Norway). The recordings and transcriptions of the Frisian transcriptions are made by the second author, and those of the standard languages (except Norway and the Faroes) by the first author. The transcriptions subsequently were checked by Jørn Almberg who we thank gratefully for correcting our transcriptions. Furthermore, we wish to express our gratitude to Peter Kleiweg for his software for creating the map (Figure 2) and visualizing the dendrogram (Figure 5). Finally we thank Maartje Schreuder for reading an earlier version of this article and giving useful comments and Angeliek van Hout for reviewing our English.