Walloon language


Walloon is a Romance language that is spoken in much of Wallonia and, to a very small extent, in Brussels, Belgium; some villages near Givet, northern France; and a clutch of communities in northeastern Wisconsin, United States.
It belongs to the langues d'oïl dialect continuum, the most prominent member of which is French. The historical background of its formation was the territorial extension since 980 of the Principality of Liège to the south and west. Walloon is classified as "definitely endangered" by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger.
Despite its rich literature, beginning anonymously in the 16th century and with well-known authors since 1756, the use of Walloon has decreased markedly since France's annexation of Wallonia in 1794. This period definitively established French as the language of social promotion, far more than it was before. After World War I, public schools provided French-speaking education to all children, inducing a denigration of Walloon, especially when accompanied by official orders in 1952 to punish its use in schools. Subsequently, since the middle of the 20th century, generational transmission of the language has decreased, resulting in Walloon almost becoming a dead language. Today it is scarcely spoken among younger people, with the vast majority of its native speakers being the elderly. In 2007, the number of people with knowledge of the language was estimated at 600,000.
Numerous associations, especially theatre companies, are working to keep the language alive. Formally recognized as a langue régionale endogène of Belgium since 1990, Walloon has also benefited from a continued corpus planning process. The "Feller system" regularized transcription of the different accents. Since the 1990s, a common orthography was established, which allowed large-scale publications, such as the Walloon Wikipedia officially in 2003. In 2004, a Walloon translation of a Tintin comic was released under the name L'èmerôde d'al Castafiore; in 2007 an album consisting of Gaston Lagaffe comic strips was published in Walloon.
Walloon is more distinct as a language than Belgian French, which differs from the French spoken in France only in some minor points of vocabulary and pronunciation.

Disputed nature of Walloon

Linguists had long classified Walloon as a dialect of French, which in turn is a langue d'oïl. Like French, it descended from Vulgar Latin. Arguing that a French-speaking person could not understand Walloon easily, especially in its eastern forms, Jules Feller insisted that Walloon had an original "superior unity", which made it a language.
The phonological divisions of regional languages of southern Belgium were studied by the contemporary linguist E.B. Atwood. He defined the precise geographical repartition of the four chief dialects of Walloon. In addition, he defined them against the dialects of Picard, Lorrain and Champenois.
Since then, most linguists, and gradually also Walloon politicians, regard Walloon as a regional language, the first in importance in Wallonia. It is the only one to have originated from that part of Belgium. The eleventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica identified Walloon as the "northernmost Romance language".

Geographic distribution

Walloon

Walloon is spoken in the Wallonia Region in Belgium. In addition, it is spoken in:
Although Walloon was widely spoken until the mid-20th century, today only a small proportion of the inhabitants of the region are fluent in the language. Those born since the 1970s usually know little more than a few idiomatic expressions, often profanities. The Walloon language is still part of the Walloon heritage; it is one component of Walloon identity.

Dialects

Four dialects of Walloon developed in four distinct zones of Wallonia:
Despite local phonetic differences, there is a regional movement towards the adoption of a common spelling, called the Rifondou walon. This orthography is diasystemic, reflecting different pronunciations for different readers, a concept inspired by the spelling of Breton. The written forms attempt to reconcile current phonetic uses with ancient traditions and the language's own phonological logic.

Other regional languages

Other regional languages spoken in Wallonia, outside the Walloon domain, are:
The Picard, Lorrain and Champenois dialects spoken in Wallonia are sometimes also referred to as "Walloon", which may lead to confusion.

Phonetics and phonology

  • may also be heard as or in word-final positions.
  • may also be pronounced as an alveolar trill among speakers.
  • can have an allophone of.
  • Latin before and before,, or gave Walloon affricate phonemes spelled tch and dj : vatche, djambe.
  • Latin persisted in clusters: spene, fistu "wisp of straw", mwaîsse, fiesse, tchestea, and so on.
  • Final obstruent devoicing: rodje "red" is pronounced exactly as rotche "rock".
  • Nasal vowels may be followed by nasal consonants, as in djonne "young", crinme "cream", mannet "dirty", etc.
  • Vowel length has a phonological value. It allows distinguishing cu "arse" and cû "cooked", i l' hosse "he cradles her" and i l' hôsse "he increases it", messe "mass" and mêsse "master", etc.

    Orthography

The Walloon alphabet generally consists of the basic ISO Latin Alphabet, and six types of diacritic. It also makes frequent use of digraphs. Various orthographies have been used, most notably the Feller system and Unified Walloon.

Characteristics

Language family

Walloon is distinguished from other languages in the langue d'oïl family both by archaism coming from Latin and by its significant borrowing from Germanic languages, as expressed in its phonetics, its lexicon, and its grammar. At the same time, Walloon phonetics are singularly conservative: the language has stayed fairly close to the form it took during the High Middle Ages.

Morphology

  • The plural feminine adjectives before the noun take an unstressed ending -ès : compare li djaene foye "the yellow leaf" and les djaenès foyes "the yellow leaves".
  • There is no gender difference in definite articles and possessives : compare Walloon li vweteure and li cir, with French la voiture and le ciel; Walloon has si coir and si finiesse with French son corps and sa fenêtre.

    Lexicon

  • Walloon has a few Latin remnants that have disappeared from neighboring Romance languages: compare Walloon dispierter to Spanish despertar and Romanian deștepta.
  • The most distinctive feature is its number of borrowings from Germanic languages : compare Walloon flåwe to today's Dutch flauw "weak". Other common borrowings, among hundreds of others, are dringuele, crole, spiter, li sprewe.

    Syntax

  • The adjective is often placed before the noun: compare Walloon on foirt ome with French un homme fort, "a strong man"; ene blanke måjhon and French une maison blanche, "a white house".
  • Borrowing from Germanic languages, the construction Cwè çki c'est di ça po ene fleur? "What kind of flower is this?" can be compared word for word to German Was ist das für eine Blume? and Dutch Wat is dat voor een bloem?, as opposed to Standard French Quelle sorte de fleur est-ce? or Quelle sorte de fleur est-ce que c'est?.

    History

From a linguistic point of view, Louis Remacle has shown that a good number of the developments that we now consider typical of Walloon appeared between the 8th and 12th centuries. Walloon "had a clearly defined identity from the beginning of the 13th century". In any case, linguistic texts from the time do not mention the language, although they mention others in the langue d'oïl family, such as Picard and Lorrain. During the 15th century, scribes in the region called the language "Roman" when they needed to distinguish it. It is not until the beginning of the 16th century that first occurrence of the word "Walloon" appeared in the current linguistic sense. In 1510 or 1511, Jean Lemaire de Belges made the connection between Rommand to Vualon:
The word "Walloon" thus came closer to its current meaning: the vernacular of the Roman part of the Low Countries. One might say that the period which saw the establishment of the unifying supremacy of the Burgundians in the Walloon country was a turning-point in their linguistic history. The crystallization of a Walloon identity, as opposed to that of the thiois regions of the Low Countries, established "Walloon" as a word for designating its people. Somewhat later, the vernacular of these people became more clearly distinct from central French and other neighbouring langues d'oïl, prompting the abandonment of the vague term "Roman" as a linguistic, ethnic, and political designator for "Walloon".
Also at this time, following the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts in 1539, the French language replaced Latin for all administrative purposes in France. Established as the academic language, French became the object of a political effort at normalization; La Pléiade posited the view that when two languages of the same language family coexist, each can be defined only in opposition to the other. Around the year 1600, the French writing system became dominant in the Wallonia. From this time, too, dates a tradition of texts written in a language marked by traces of spoken Walloon. The written language of the preceding centuries, scripta, was a composite language with some Walloon characteristics but it did not attempt to be a systematic reproduction of the spoken language.