In that clip its mentioned that UW-Eau Claire professor Kelly D. Biers, was getting involved.
"They are recording conversations between speakers of Walloon, so they can study the language. The goal to create a written version of the Wisconsin dialect. Then create teaching materials for grade school children within the Southern Door school district. Making sure even that even if nobody is going to be speaking it on a regular basis, that we have some sort of record of it."You can read more about the Walloon Preservation Project here. And the research team attempting to document the language here. It was a joint effort between Kelly Biers, and Ellen Osterhaus.
Kelly plans to create a Wisconsin Walloon primer that will be easily accessible to the Wisconsin Belgian community. The primer will include basic information about the language and essential words and phrases which will allow current and future community members to understand, practice and thereby preserve a record of their language. The project involves the development of an orthography and content for the primer, involving native speakers in the creation and editing of materials, and dissemination online and in print. Much of this process is already underway and has received enthusiastic support from community members and organizations.
It would be great if someone had enough info to create a Rosetta Stone Walloon Course. But I really don't know if something that grand of nature is part of the plan. At a local level I hear that Margaret Rueckl leads meetings in the Luxemburg area to learn about the language.
*Update, sadly it appears that Kelly Biers is no longer at UW Eau Claire. He is now at the University of North Carolina. However I did email him and he says their plan is to begin working on a book that describes the history, vocabulary, and grammar of the language. Come the new year he said he plans to pick up the progress.
Speaking Walloon on a regular basis historically meant living in the Door / Kewaunee areas so that you would have someone to talk to, to be able to keep with the language. The women that speak it well that stand out to me are the ones that owned bars and had frequent opportunities to talk to people.
Its possible that in the future one could keep up the language with a virtual assistant like Alexa. Where you would speak in Walloon and she would answer in Walloon. This would interest me enough to actually embrace that type of technology.
Having been exposed to the language in my younger years when my grandfather was alive I still turn to the internet to try and figure out what I heard. I am middle aged now, and having been looking at old plat maps to first recognize Belgian last names. Turns out after talking to some of my friends that I didn't realize were Belgian (or had forgot), they too heard some simple phrases and would also like to know more.
This seems to be a good place to start:
Omniglot - the online encyclopedia of written systems and languages - it has some useful phrases in Walloon. But it lacks the recorded spoken samples!
What is nice about that site is you can click on the English translation and then listen to the same phrase in French and other languages.
I made a post about sites with recorded Walloon on the Belgian Heritage Center's Facebook page, and a nice gentleman from Belgium provided this link:
http://www.ecoledewallon.be/apprentissage_du_wallon.html
There is also;
https://app.memrise.com/course/1289923/walloon-1-namur/
Then there is always a the 1976 recordings of relative of mine, Leonard Lampereur. He speaks in Walloon several times in the oral history.
And there is the 2014 Youtube video: Disappearing Language: Walloon (Ali Maden and Ege Gedikli)
It turns out in the early 1980's Josephine LeGrave Wautlet created a Phonetic Walloon course, complete with recordings. I am checking with UWGB's research center to see if I can get my hands on a fully copy of this. I did manage to rescue some of the first lessons, but I don't have the full thing.
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