Walloon language

• 1. Introduction

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  Walloon is a Romance language spoken in the green hills and industrial valleys of Wallonia, the French-speaking region of southern Belgium. UNESCO has classified it as "definitely endangered", placing it in the same precarious category as languages spoken by only a handful of elders in remote corners of the world. Yet Walloon is not remote at all. It lives in cities, in theatre halls packed with more than 200,000 audience members each year, and in the pockets of Wisconsin where Belgian immigrants settled in the 19th century.

  What makes a language lose ground in its own homeland? How does a tongue spoken by the vast majority of an entire people shrink, within a century, to something scarcely known by anyone under 30? And what does it take to keep a language alive when the state, the school, and even the family have turned away from it? Walloon's story reaches back to the 8th century and winds through Burgundian courts, French Revolutionary armies, comic book translators, and one man born on the 15th of March 1959 who sings its songs to anyone who will listen.

• 2. A Language Takes Shape

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  Louis Remacle, one of the linguists who devoted his career to Walloon, demonstrated that the developments we now regard as distinctively Walloon first appeared between the 8th and 12th centuries. By the beginning of the 13th century, the language already had what Remacle called a "clearly defined identity". Yet scribes of that era did not bother to name it. When they listed the languages of the langue d'oil family, they mentioned Picard and Lorrain, but Walloon passed unnamed.

  The word itself did not appear in its current linguistic sense until the early 16th century. In 1510 or 1511, the writer Jean Lemaire de Belges described the inhabitants of Nivelles as speakers of "the old Gallic language which we call Vualon or Rommand". His words were remarkably specific: he listed Hainaut, Cambrai, Artois, Namur, Liege, Lorraine, Ardennes, and Rommand Brabant as the territory of this language, and he insisted it was "very different from French, which is more fashionable and courtly".

  The word "Walloon" had until that point described a people, not a tongue. It was the crystallization of Walloon identity against the Dutch-speaking thiois regions of the Low Countries that finally gave the language its name. The Ordinance of Villers-Cotterets in 1539, which made French the sole language of administration in France, pushed that distinction further. Around 1600, the French writing system became dominant in Wallonia, and a tradition began of texts written in a form of French visibly marked by the sounds and habits of spoken Walloon.

• 3. Four Dialects, One Language

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  Namur, the capital of Wallonia, sits at the heart of the Central dialect zone, alongside the cities of Wavre and Dinant. Liege, to the east, speaks what linguists regard as the most conservative and idiosyncratic of the four dialects. The Western dialect, closest to French and shaped by strong Picard influence, belongs to Charleroi, Nivelles, and Philippeville. The Southern dialect, spoken in Bastogne, Marche-en-Famenne, and Neufchateau in the Ardennes, leans toward the neighboring Lorrain and Champenois languages.

  These four zones are not merely different accents of the same words. The phonemes themselves shift. In Liege and neighboring areas, certain consonant sounds that exist elsewhere in Walloon merge into a single sound. The southern dialects handle other sounds differently still. Vowel length carries meaning in Walloon that it does not carry in French, allowing speakers to distinguish between words that would otherwise sound identical.

  To address this internal diversity, a common orthography called the Rifondou walon was developed since the 1990s. It is described as diasystemic, meaning the same written form can be read differently by speakers from different areas, each according to their own pronunciation. The concept was borrowed from the spelling system of Breton. Earlier, Jules Feller, who lived from 1859 to 1940, had created the Feller system in 1900 to regularize the transcription of Walloon's different accents. That system remained the standard for nearly a century before the Rifondou walon expanded the possibilities for large-scale publication.

• 4. The Germanic Thread

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  Walloon borrowed heavily from Germanic languages in ways that set it apart from every other member of the langue d'oil family. The word for "tip" or gratuity in Walloon is dringuele, taken from the Dutch drinkgeld. The word for "curl" is crole, from the Dutch krul. The starling, a common bird across northern Europe, is called li sprewe in Walloon, a word shared with the Dutch spreeuw and the German Sperling. The word spiter, meaning to spatter, shares its root with English words like spit and spew, and with German and Dutch equivalents.

  These borrowings are not superficial. They reach into phonetics and grammar as well. Latin sounds that disappeared from French survived in Walloon, producing affricate consonants spelled tch and dj. The Latin word for cow became vatche in Walloon, where French settled on vache. The word for leg became djambe, where French uses jambe. A cluster of Latin consonants that French dropped entirely survived intact in Walloon.

  The syntax shows the Germanic imprint most vividly in a construction the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica called the "northernmost Romance language" in the world. The Walloon question "Cwoe cki c'est di ca po ene fleur?" meaning "What kind of flower is this?" maps word for word onto the German "Was ist das fur eine Blume?" and the Dutch "Wat is dat voor een bloem?", while the French equivalent follows an entirely different structure. Many French words connected to mining and the textile trade trace their origins to the Walloon-Picard complex.

• 5. The Great Retreat

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  France's annexation of Wallonia in 1794 set off a process from which Walloon has never recovered. French became, definitively, the language of social advancement. To speak Walloon was to mark oneself as belonging to a world of labor and village life, not to the world of opportunity and education.

  After World War I, public schools across Wallonia delivered their instruction entirely in French. Children arrived speaking Walloon and were educated in a language their grandparents might barely have known. Official orders issued in 1952 went further still, directing schools to punish the use of Walloon on the premises. The generation that grew up in those classrooms became the generation that did not pass the language to their children.

  By the end of the 20th century, 70-80% of Wallonians over 60 still spoke Walloon with fluency. Among those under 30, the figure had fallen to roughly 10%. Those born since the 1970s typically know little beyond a handful of idiomatic phrases, often profanities. In 2007, the total number of people with any knowledge of the language was estimated at 600,000. Laurent Hendschel has estimated 1,300,000 bilingual speakers in Wallonia, counting Walloon-French and Picard-French together, a figure that reflects passing familiarity as much as active use.

• 6. Literature and the Stage

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  Walloon-language literature has existed in print since at least the beginning of the 17th century, but its golden age arrived with the height of Flemish immigration to Wallonia in the 19th century. That period brought an outpouring of plays and poems, and with them the founding of many theatres and periodicals. The New York Public Library holds what is quite possibly the largest collection of Walloon literary works outside Belgium. Of nearly a thousand works in that collection, only twenty-six predate 1880. Publications rose year by year after that, reaching a peak of sixty-nine in 1903, then falling sharply to eleven by 1913.

  Yves Quairiaux counted 4,800 Walloon plays produced between 1860 and 1914, published or not. In that era, Walloon theatre was almost the only popular entertainment available across the region. Several 19th-century authors used Aesop's Fables as a vehicle for Walloon expression. Charles Duvivier adapted them in 1842, Joseph Lamaye in 1845, and the team of Jean-Joseph Dehin and Francois Bailleux worked on them between 1847 and 1866, covering books I through VI. Leon Bernus published around a hundred imitations of La Fontaine in the dialect of Charleroi in 1872, and Joseph Dufrane wrote in the Borinage dialect during the 1880s under the pen name Bosquetia. Joseph Houziaux returned to the tradition in 1946 with fifty fables in the Condroz dialect.

  The theatrical tradition did not vanish. Today more than 200 non-professional companies perform in the cities and villages of Wallonia each year, drawing audiences totaling over 200,000. Raymond Queneau, the French author, arranged the publication of a Walloon Poets' anthology for Editions Gallimard. Andre Blavier, a notable figure from Verviers and a friend of Queneau, translated Ubu roi into Walloon for the puppet theatre of Liege run by Jacques Ancion. In 2004, a Walloon translation of a Tintin comic appeared under the title L'emerode d'al Castafiore, and in 2007 an album of Gaston Lagaffe comic strips was published in Walloon.

• 7. Keeping the Language Alive

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  Formally, Walloon gained legal recognition in 1990, when the French Community of Belgium, the cultural authority of the region, named it an indigenous regional language that must be studied in schools and actively encouraged. The Walloon Wikipedia launched officially in 2003, giving the language a platform for large-scale text production that no previous generation had.

  The Union Culturelle Wallonne coordinates over 200 amateur theatre circles, writers' groups, and school councils. About a dozen Walloon magazines publish on a regular basis. The Societe de Langue et de Litterature Wallonne, founded in 1856, continues to promote Walloon literature and to support scholarly work in dialectology and etymology. Walloon is also spoken outside Belgium in a small area around the Pointe de Givet in northern France, and in communities in Door County, Kewaunee County, and Brown County in Wisconsin, a legacy of large-scale Belgian immigration in the 19th century.

  The best-known singer performing in Walloon in present-day Wallonia is William Dunker, born on the 15th of March 1959. His presence represents one thread in the broader effort to keep the language audible to a generation that largely encounters it only through performance, not daily speech. The scholar Jean-Marie Klinkenberg has framed this shift in terms that resist nostalgia: the dialectal culture, he wrote, is no longer a sign of attachment to the past but a way to participate in a new synthesis. Whether that synthesis will be enough to reverse a two-century decline is a question the next generation of Walloon speakers will have to answer.