orth and West Frisian speakers were among the earliest settlers in the colony of New Amsterdam, possibly constituting, according to one source, the single largest ethnic group in the multicultural mix of early New Amsterdam. Peter Stuyvesant himself, the famous director general of the colony from 1647 to 1664, was born and raised in Friesland (part of the Dutch Republic) and would have been familiar with West Frisian. Others like Brooklyn settler Pieter Claessen (Wyckoff) were North Frisians. Frisian immigration resumed on a significant scale in the 19th century, with most going to the Midwest, but many West Frisians also passed through or stayed in New York or Paterson, New Jersey, forming social organizations with some ties to the Dutch-speaking community. North Frisians (more tied to the German community) came in large numbers to Brooklyn from the islands of Föhr and Amrum—1,500 Föhrer before 1929, for instance, who mostly spoke Fering and founded an association later headquartered in Valley Stream. Today, West Frisian is an official national language of the Netherlands along with Dutch and remains vital in its home territory, but North Frisian and Saterland Frisian, minority languages within Germany, have much smaller numbers of speakers. Among the German languages, the Frisian languages are the closest group linguistically to the Anglic group, of which English is a part.