Walloons in Superior Wisconsin?

Recently Kelly Biers, the professor who has been studying the Walloon language in Northeast Wisconsin put out a FAQ via the Belgian Heritage Center.

The problem is it has some unverified information. In particular the part about Walloons from the Peshtigo area going to Superior. The timing of the Walloon language post was convenient as I had been looking at Martinette Co. Belgians. There aren't a whole lot compared to Oconto. What first made me question the claim was that I found no Belgians from this area that I had just been reviewing that I could not account for their whereabouts.

So that prompted me to look North. The problem I run into is find no Belgian’s whatsoever when I manually review all 14 pages of the 1880 Douglas -> Superior (ED 215) census. I also checked the 1875 state census, but had to look just for anything resembling a Belgian name since these records don’t have much detail. Again, nothing.

By 1900 or shortly there after an immigration boom occurs so the population increases a lot. This makes it harder to look at. Yes then there are tons of Belgian's with Flemish names. That's not to say some didn't emigrate from the Walloon area. But either way their arrival was certainly after 1880, and more or less right around 1900 or shorly there after.

It did also occur to me that these Belgian's who left the Peshtigo area and went to Superior might actually be the children of Belgians (WI born). That also make it harder to sort. But in all the pages I reviewed by eye, nothing made me a believer.

Kelly Biers seems to have gotten his information on the matter from the Superior Catholic Diocese website. https://catholicdos.org/the-belgians as this eludes to some Belgians who were from the Peshtigo area that made there way to Allouez, Douglas County. Then other web articles pretty much echo this. https://www.superiortelegram.com/business/belgian-club-welcomes-all-for-centennial-celebration "In Superior, Belgians started to settle in the Allouez neighborhood in the 1870s and their numbers continued to grow into the early part of the 20th century as they found work with the grain elevators and ore docks on Superior’s waterfront...."

I reached out two a couple people in Northern Wisconsin. First to Jon Winter with the Douglas County Historical Society. He looked in the February 10, 1906 newspaper however did not find any article regarding Belgians. This is cited on the diocese website. So at this point it was time to contact the diocese. Peggy M. Schoenfuss up there was kind enough to look into their archives. She sent me information on History of the Belgian club started 1912, and two documents on History of SS. Anthony & Margaret Parish, Allouez, Superior WI. None of this indicated a presense of Belgians prior to 1900. Ann Tracy up there who is in charge of the wesbite wrote "You've stumbled into an outdated part of our website that I don't have a lot of context on. I've sent over your email to a few folks who may be able to help and will follow-up when I hear from them. My guess is that this information was pulled from this old website from a local Superior church."

Jon at the Douglas historical society mentioned "In my research I've been reading Frontier Village The Birth of Superior Wisconsin by Ronald Mershart. There are local census tallies showing no Belgian born citizens in 1870 or 1880. A quote from the book is "It is noteworthy that Pole, Slovak, Finn and Belgian emigres, who would soon be an important element of the population of the burgeoning city, were nowhere to be found in 1880."

Lesson learned, don't believe everything on the internet. Also it would be nice if before the diocese led a bunch of people astray, they would have been more vigilant with their research before putting it online.

Francophone to English soundex

Kelly Biers has been working for quite a while on an English like way to spell Walloon words. It's the result of a desire by the Belgian American people of Wisconsin to have a way to write things without really understanding written French.

The soundex system is an indexing system based on the way a name sounds rather than the way it's spelled used to find individuals in census records. However since soundex is based on English pronunciation, some European names may not soundex correctly. An example is the French name Roux - where the x is silent. While Rue (R000) is pronounced identically to Roux (R200), they will have different soundex codes. This could be true of any surname that does not use English pronunciation.

For the purpose of genealogy what Kelly has been working on has an application. He has laid the ground work for Francophone to English soundex mapping. But it would still take a software coder to make this into something that could be easily used by the masses.

This blog

I started blogging in 2003 when it was a fairly new thing for my ham radio hobby. A few years back I wanted to start publically documenting things related to the Walloon language. So I started this blog. In reality this day in age you are better off reaching people on social media than a blog. But the fine people of Belgium have established many social media channels to promote their language. Most however due to the limiations of the various platforms are not sharing much in the way of a recorded pronunciation. That sort of thing would be the most beneficial in my opinion to those outside of Belgium, such as myself.

So what you see frequently is written Walloon on the various social media channels. Even using a blog sharing recorded audio is not straight forward. Your best bet is to convert the audio to a video (add a still image), and use youtube or the like.

So while I do not post much here, I do post various things to the Wisconsin Walloon archive.org collection. It becomes a mix of things that I find or feel are obscure and realted to the language that need to be put in a centralized place. Some of it will not be easily understood by those in Wisconsin. They are being added for the the benefit of those in Belgium. And then there are supplementary things I add to help people here in Wisconsin better understand their identity.

I have to use my best judgement on what I post, and whenever possible I unclude a source URL for what I am reposting. I try by best to research who has the rights, but the people are largely unreachable. So if there are content issues on what I have added to the collection please reach out to me. Please also reach out to me if you spot content (especially vidoes), that would help people learn the language.

practicealanguage.xyz

https://practicealanguage.xyz/ "Practice a language by having conversations about the topic of your choice." The reason I am pointing out this website even though it doesn't (yet) support Walloon is because it's open source. And thus, becomes a good example of free alternative to other language learning tools. It uses GPT-3.5 to have conversations and Whisper-1 (ASR). Those underlying components are where Walloon support is lacking. Whisper is a general-purpose speech recognition model. https://github.com/openai/whisper

The National Belgian Village

In the early 1960's there was a movement mostly headed by Hank Quartemont who was doing the public relations to rename Fairland back to Namur.

What's more was a plan to build a home For the elderly named the "Villa Madonna".. and possibly a future museum. George Baudhuin pledged $150,000. This would have been a very good thing as it would have brought jobs to the area. Sadly both of these gentlemen died earlier that they should have, and thus it never took off.

The reason I post this here is because retaining ones heritage is not easy. Though according to Professor Bill Laatsch, we've done a pretty impressive job. However it never hurts to look at where you've been to figure out where you are going. Since then, the museum part has transpired in the form of the Belgian Heritage Center. But again, some jobs in the area would do a lot of good. Perhaps that can still happen as a lot of jobs let one work from home these days.

I've been looking at other places where Belgian's settled and the Carolina's has a large number of more recent immigrants. And that seems to be related to The European American Chamber Of Commerce Carolinas. The odd part is while there are many Belgian business references in those areas, I can't seem to locate any Belgian clubs where they are settling.

Another interesting place is Louisiana. From what I am told, there’s been a constant influx of French speaking Belgians to Louisiana for the last 50 years because of the CoDoFil program.

"CODOFIL is the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana. Our mission as Louisiana's French agency is to support and grow Louisiana's francophone communities through scholarships, French immersion and various other community and language skill-building programs."

Interestingly enough, one resolutions of the early (formed in 1913) Belgian Club's in Green Bay was to have the French language added to the curriculum of the Green Bay schools. Unfortunately, the goal was not achieved in the grade schools, but high schools did give French as a language choice.

Sadly we don't have much lure to Belgian's today. That would go a long way for keeping the heritage nice and strong. Of course the trips with the Wisconsin-Wallonie Club did play a part in Auguste Hayot immigrating when he met and fell in love in Emma who translated for him on his first visit.

Walloon words on wiktionary

I've noticed more recently a few Walloon words with English definitions on wiktionary.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nodidju

And don't forget about the IPA reader. Just remember to select the Mathieu [French] voice profile. Keep in mind this is not perfect. Walloon vowels are not always exactly the same as in French (some are a bit longer or more or less open) and they have more /h/ sounds (in the East they also have a /x/ sound like in German/Spanish/Russian).

Using AI (artificial intelligence) to preserve Wallloon?

The first question some may have is why? Anything like the development; of the internet for example, that can create an easier way for people to learn something is beneficial. It may get to the point in Belgium (and I hope it doesn't, but it plays to plan ahead), where the number of Walloon speakers are far apart. This makes the ability for the potential remaining minority to learn from, difficult. Such is the case here already in Wisconsin.

ASR (automatic speech recognition) such as the technology in Amazon's Alexa, and Google's Assistant, is the process of interpreting spoken words into written words. There are privacy conerns to some on a device with an open microphone. However being able to keep fluent with a such a virtual assistant, my asking what todays weather forecast is, and the latest sports scores can be beneficial. More-so when there are less oportunities to interact human to human.

Lucyin Mahin has had a clear vision that a common way to write in Walloon needs to be established. From what I gather its acceptance/use has been mixed. But even for the language to survive in a oral form, at the academic level there must be a standard written version. This day in the digital world, that is paramount.

I've been reading up on organizations behind linguistic policy. Its amazing to me that I never really thought about how American English words are put into dictionaries, etc. But American English is a bit weird in that reguard. Most languages have a country endorsement, and /or formal group behind the languages policy.

I recommend the formation of a organization representing Walloon. Something like how we created the Belgian Heritage Center organization. An entity with officers who can toot their horn, write letters and advocate for a synthetic model of standardized Walloon. This organization could act as a decision maker in terms of walloon spelling for the community.

Belgium has an impressive (to me anyway) collective group linguistics, media/content creators trying to save a language.. So I am thinking some bigger cental organzation to work with all the smaller groups? Since the rifondou isn't catching on, and that seems to be a key thing to its survival... I'd say the Walloons should identify who would benefit the most from a standard spelling... It seems to me anyone trying to publish books would be the first people I'd approach for donations to try and fund the organzation.

Then if the Walloons are interested in a modern syntheic model, the question is how get the big tech players to pay attention to basically a minority language?

When I see the reports of AI developers working to save Icelandic and other languages, I am not sure if there is money exchanged or if there is just a marketing incentive.

Once you have a organization formed then you can advertise or reach out to the AI companies. And if you think having the Belgian Heritage Center co-sign such a request will help, please let us know, as we gladly will.

As its sits Google's Bard, and OpenAI's chat-gpt are likely the most promising technolgy right now. While they do claim to self learn, my experence has been they also forget. I think for this to really be able to translate written Walloon well, it will take developer input to feed it training data.

I asked Bard if there was anyone of Belgian heritage working at google. "Bart De Smet is a Senior Software Engineer at Google AI. He is originally from Belgium and has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Leuven." So that is a plus! (However this conflicts with his Linked In profile which says he works at Microsoft)