[citation needed] A number of individuals, despite not being active speakers of East Frisian Low Saxon, are able to understand it to some extent.
The dialects in the east, called Harlinger Platt, are strongly influenced by Northern Low Saxon of Oldenburg.
The language originally spoken in East Frisia and Groningen was Frisian, so the current Low German dialects of East Frisia, as part of the dialects, build on a Frisian substrate which has led to a large amount of unique lexical, syntactic, and phonological items which differ from other Low Saxon variants.
[citation needed] East Frisian features frequent use of diminutives, as in the Dutch language, e.g. kluntje ‘lump of rock sugar’.
However, a newer, more phonetic orthography was developed in 1975 by Holger Weigelt, since he expressed concerns that the grammatical structures and character of East Frisian Low Saxon would not be presented well under the Sass-based spelling.