Spoken Walloon in Wisconsin - as noted in the 1970's

May 25, 1976 Door County Advocate
Translated by Jose Wautlet

A voyage to the home of the Walloons in Wisconsin .... first article in a series of five sent to me by Mm. J.P. Gerard. These articles were published in the paper in Namur, Belgium, after the return of the group who spent some time here last summer. I offer my translation to the best of my meager ability:

-=partial excerpt=-

Because of their citizenship, The Wallons have adopted English throughout, but meanwhile they have preserved their Wallon. It is a Wallon so pure; it is similar to the dialect of the Wallon center spoken from Jadoigne to Meux. But in the meantime, they have adapted English words when referring to of modern inventions as, "calling" on the telephone, "broadcaster" on the radio "locking the car" etc.

---

September 19, 1974 Door County Advocate
Belgians can't believe visitors really American
By Jose Wautlet

-=partial excerpt=-

You cannot imagine the looks on people's faces here when they hear us speak in their native language. They stare and smile unbelievingly. They cannot believe that after a hundred and twenty years of separation, we have returned here still speaking the local patois. In fact, some will not believe that we really have come from America.

Yesterday I spoke to a lovely young woman on the street In front of a market. She kept asking it again and again. Finally, I asked her to write her name and address in my notebook and promised to send her a card from America. Then she will believe!

Many of them have told us that we speak Wallon better than they do, and it is understandable. Through the years they have absorbed French words into their speech, where ours has remained the pure Belgian Wallon of this area.

NWTI Offers Wallon Course (1978)

NWTI Offers Wallon Course
Wed, Mat 1 1978
Algoma Record Herald

A beginners and intermediate class in the Wallon Belgian dialect will be offered as a NWTI course in the spring session to begin soon.

Classes will be at Algoma High school on Tuesday evenings from 7 to 9. Josie Wautlet, who has taught previous courses in this language, will be the instructor.

Those interested are asked to call Mary Ann Delveaux, NWTI coordinator, at 487-2580, or Mrs. Wautlet at 487-5636.

Dictionaries of the Wallon words with their English and French equivalents will be available.

The purpose of the course is to teach the understanding of the spoken Wallon language and the pronunciation of words and sentences in this language.

"We may even learn to sing some Wallon ditties." Mrs. Wautlet added. Classes will be: limited to the first 15 registants.

Kermiss

For as long as I have been alive we have spelled it Kermiss. But the tradition here in Wisconsin dates back to the first being held in Rosiere in September of 1858. As you can see by the late 1930's Wisconsin Belgian's had a couple spelling varieties (I've also seen; Kermiss, Kermis, Kermess, Kirmess) :

The proper French/Walloon spelling is Kermesse, and it sounds much like how we say it in English (Pronunciation by Pat91). The Flemish spell it Kermis.

And in case you need to review the history:

Couillon - Cooyah/cuyoo

From: Li walon po tertos

Cooyah/cuyoo is definitely "coyon/couyon" in Walloon and it is also a card game here. The original meaning is "ball, testicle".
Apparently it was used to refer to the circle used in the calculation of the scores.
You can find more information in French here for instance:
https://reglesdejeux.github.io/regles-du-jeu-couillon/index.html

(If you use "couillon" in French, it actually means "idiot")

Here in Wisconsin the popular Belgian card game has been spelled a couple different ways. Pronounced "koo yo" here, sometimes with almost a Q sound at the beginning.

Roadside Chapel - Arlene (DeChamps) Jadin

Tatoeba: Collection of sentences and translations

It might be good to review Tatoeba:

It has Walloon entries and could be used to find more Walloon natives and potentially reach out to them for info/resources

This person is apparently native Walloon? https://tatoeba.org/en/user/profile/yanagi

But sadly there are no recorded samples presently. I think this would be another good thing for a Walloon speaker to submit recordings too. I pointed out Omniglot previously.

Outside of Tatoeba, Lucyin Mahin maintains a Wallon version of Wikipedia and has contribued heavily to wikimedia.

José Schoovaerts is another person from Belgium, who is heavily interested in documenting the language.

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a phonetic notation that is really what we need to get a number Walloon words documented in. For the few words I have heard, I usually recognize them in the non-standard phonetic written formats that various people have tried to write the lanugage in. The problem is everyone who has tried to write it has each done so a little differently. And then there are words written by various people that I have likely never heard and so I cannot really determine how one would say what they wrote.

The IPA is just as confusing and sadly really only benefits lingusitic people in my opinion. The realistic way we learn how words sound is from hearing them. So for the average person, that is what needs to be developed, a sampling of recorded words with their English and French spellings.

The is another somewhat interesting Facebook group called "Walloon lexicon." The about info says "Because I love the Walloon language, I share with you the history of its vocabulary."

Here is a recent post:

Walloon word of the day : cabasson \kabasɔ̃\
Dialectal form : (?)
Origin :
From Spanish "cabezón" (big-headed, stubborn), cabeza (head) + the suffix -ón.
From Old Spanish cabeça, from Vulgar Latin capitia, from a feminine singular of Latin capitium, diminutive of caput (head).
From Proto-Italic * kaput (head), from Proto-Indo-European * káput- (head), from * kap- (sixteen, hold), possibly of substrate origin.
-ón probably from the ending of Latin words belonging to the Third Declension (-ō, -ōnem), from Proto-Indo-European * -h₃onh₂- (?).
Meaning :
Cabesson = headrest, caveçon.

Interesting posts, but how would the words sound if spoken? Well the only real clue is that mysterious IPA representation: \kabasɔ̃\

Fortunatly there is a tool for reading International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) notation aloud at: http://ipa-reader.xyz/

This is also good. If you use French to English, you will get the IPA for the French word, plus a sound clip of the pronunciation
http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/french-english/

French to IPA dictionary:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/open-dict-data/ipa-dict/master/data/fr_FR.txt

Making Grain Bundles - David Chaudoir & Francis Jauquet

Walloon virtual assistant ?

When my aunt and uncle were telling of their trip to Belgium and bringing a group of visiting Belgians around in the 1990's, I was in high school, I seriously considered taking a French class. Back then, area immigration was at a standstill (unlike the last ~20 years), as the last group were the Hmong. I had other interests in tech-ed, so I never persued that idea. And today I could just kick myself. At the time I figured I'd never use it and likely forget what I would have learned. I was also aware there were differences between Walloon and French and figured learning French might lead to some counter productive mixed ideas that "this must be like this etc".

I never envisioned that actual genealogical records would one day be available in their native French form on the internet. The internet wasn't quite a thing back then. So that is where I kick myself today.

There is still a lot of truth to the if you don't use it, you loose it logic. So enter in virtual assistants like Amazon's Alexa. Could this be a way to keep fluent when you don't have anyone to talk to in French or Walloon?

Back in 2012 a bit before these things became more common placed, I did experiment with ASR (auto matic speech recognition), or what some people may refer to as voice recognition. I'm a bit more of a hacker and a coder than a gadget obsessed techno-weirdo, so at the moment I haven't picked up any of these virtual assistants.

But if you could ask Alexa in French what the weather is, I could see some value to this technology.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/2/22088394/amazon-alexa-multilingual-support-italian-german-french-shopping-fire-tv

https://www.engadget.com/2018-06-06-alexa-finally-comes-to-france.html

Netradyle

For earlier Belgian family members, the place to start is the Netradyle website, and the best page to jump into Netradyle is at https://www.netradyle.be/actes/. You will probably want to immediately translate the page to English. (Alternative site is: http://www.wallonia-asbl.be/actes/)

Netradyle is the work of the Perwez Genealogical Circle (club). It is social group of locals who gather to discuss and work on genealogy matters. Part of their efforts has been to index birth/baptisms, marriages, and deaths plus some miscellaneous items from communities in northern Wallonia, and they present this information in the “actes”= records, section of their website at the above website.

You can search through the “actes” in a variety of ways. The most straightforward is via the “direct search” box in the upper left of the actes page. For example, if you put in the name Lempereur, select baptisms/births, and click “Checker” = Search you will get a list of 320 birth/baptism records (birth if after 1796; baptism if before 1796). If you scroll down to #156 and click, you will get this:

Alternatively to this direct search procedure, you can use an advanced search, or you can use the long table of village names on the right side of the “actes” page, and search by type of acte and name in just the village of interest.

Once one has the information from the Netradyle records, it is fairly straightforward to find the actual document that is indexed. For example, to see the actual Marriage Registration above, one goes to FamilySearch and locates the records from Thorembais-les-Béguines, specifically the marriage records that include the year 1839. These are arranged by date, so ones simply browses to the date 10 July in the 1839 records, and wallah!

For Thorembais-les-Béguines, go to the familysearch find a collection under records, and in the search box type "Belgium". You'll see all the collections for the country. "Belgium, Brabant, Civil Registration, 1582-1914," is the collection we want since Thorembais-les-Béguines is part of the Walloon Brabant Province.

Belgian Roadside Chapels

When covid started last year, Fr. Edward Looney the pastor at St. Francis & St Mary's of Brussels started doing a virtual tour of the various Belgian Chapels.

The wayside votive chapels of Northeast Wisconsin are a religious tradition brought from the old world. In the 1850s, Belgian immigrants began settling in northeast Brown, northwest Kewaunee, and southern Door counties, bringing their cherished culture and customs. Primarily devout Roman Catholics, they made their homes in a wilderness where crude roads and few churches made it difficult to assemble and practice their faith. To compensate, some settlers continued the Belgian tradition of building a family chapel, often to give thanks for prayers or to honor the Blessed Virgin Mary or a special saint.

The Belgian Wayside Chapels are evidence of the historic faith of the Belgian settlers, and of the determination of their modern descendants to preserve the Belgian culture and way of life. Today, more than a dozen of these chapels are lovingly maintained, often by descendants of the families who built them.

Fr Looney started a Facebook page for his virtual tour and visits. https://www.facebook.com/BelgianRoadsideChapels

That prompted me to try and create an online map for the chapels. You'll find paper brochures in most of the chapels that were produced by the Belgian Heritage Center a while back. However since they encompass three counties the map lacks resolution. For anyone who isn't adventurous when it comes to rural roads that map mighth be problematic.

http://belgianchapels.org/

Fr. Looney has now created a gofund me page to "create aprofessional documentary and submit it to major Catholic and secular media outlets like EWTN, Catholic TV, Shalom World, Wisconsin Public Television, PBS Wisconsin, and others."

https://www.gofundme.com/f/faith-along-the-road-documentary

I am surprised how often they get visited. Most have a guest book in them. I haven't seen one that didn't have an entry more than a week old. And while a number of the visitors have Belgian last names, there are plenty of Illinois tourists checking them out... then the more odd entries like folks from Czechoslovakia, Hawaii etc.

Some early history

Every now and then I like to look at what recent books have been added to the Internet Archive collection that you can borrow/check out.

The following is from "The growth of the Belgian Nation" by: Jan Albert Goris published in 1946:

Belgium has also at all times evinced a spirit of expansion. Although the Belgians have occasionally been reproached for being stay-at-home folks, history seems to contradict this accusation. A few years after Caesar conquered Belgium, Walloon soldiers were fighting in the ranks of the Roman legions. Later they took part in ail the big European battles, during the wars of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Considerable numbers of Flemings and Walloons followed William the Conqueror to England, and later the weavers of Flanders settled in Great Britain by thousands. There were Belgian migrations to Pomerania, Silesia, Hungary. And at the time of the great voyages of exploration and discovery, natives of Ghent peopled the "Flemish Isles" which later were called the Azores.

This helps explain why you'll find some people with the same surnames in England as you do in Belgium.

And as early as the 9th century, miners and iron workers came to Sweden from southern and eastern Belgium, along with neighboring areas in France. Most of the Walloons were iron workers coming from the Liege and Namur regions, along the Meuse River.

Belgian Population Registers

Ron Flemal has spotted some Belgian Population Registers on FamilySearch that are helpful to settlers in the Door and Kewaunee County areas.

I am reposting it here like I do a number of things since things get lost on social media due to the walled garden effect and generally don't get indexed by the search engines, etc.

The population registers are as close as you get to the United States census records. Kristine Smets' wrote a very good overview of the Belgian population registers, explaining the background and what you can expect to learn from them.

Film#: 008895560 (DGS) https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/1395667?availability=Family%20History%20Library
There are a few neighborhoods on this continuous film, an area of interest; Emimes begins at image 831:

Emines, Namur Population Register 1846-1866: https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QHV-Y3GZ-DD41?i=830&cat=1395698

Film#: 008895560 Neuvilles and Gilots, of Emines, Belgium (beginning at image 954): https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QHV-Y3GZ-DZY2?cat=1395698

Film#: 008897195 (DGS) Saint-Denis, Namur Population Register 1846-1900: https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/1409269?availability=Family%20History%20Library

Film#: 008897195 Delwiche of Saint-Denis, Belgium (beginning at image 92): https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QHV-13G6-6611

Film#: 008897195 Jeanquart of Saint-Denis, Belgium (beginning at image 119) https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QHV-B3G6-66N7?cat=1409267

Don't Drink This Water

From the Li walon po tertos group:

Language is about identity

In a 2013 paper by Jacqueline Lee Tinkler, titled "Determinants of Ethnic Retention As See Through Walloon Immigrants to Wisconsin," she pointed out;

"For generations, the community remained a close-knit, cohesive, nearly self-sufficient ethnic island, maintaining their religion, language, and customs.

After Indian reservations and the Amish communities, the settlement of Walloon Belgians in northeast Wisconsin is the most enduring ethnic island in the United States. "

Recently a two page article on revitalizing Indigenous languages in Wisconsin appeared in the local newspaper. (GBPG Wed, Jun 9, 2021)

"Laugauge is at a core of what ie means to be Oneida, Menominee, Ho-Chunk, Mohican, Potawatomi or Ojibwe, as the phrases and sentences consistently reinforce an Indigenous way of thinking at looking at the world", Francour and others say. "Language is about identity as a people, and it had been nearly completly taken away through forced assimilation..."

The article about Native American lanugages really can apply to our own native Walloon language. It's worth a read. Think about lanugage in the context that Belgium didn't become its own county till 1830, and just a short time later many left to come to Wisconsin. It wasn't so much their county that defined them as it was their language. That language traces back to the Holy Roman Empire.

And we have all heard or read the story of when our ancestors first came to Wisconsin and had planned to settle near Sheboygan, but had trouble communicating there as it was mostly all Germans. So they headed North as they heard there were French speakers there.

Sewing/Quilting - Margaret Monfils

Nouns and adjectives

French doesn't have the same word order as English.  In French most adjectives go after the noun.

An example is "cher," which is commonly part of a greeting.  If it's used before a noun, it means "dear" (ex: Chere Julie), whereas if it's after a noun, ex: "une robe chere", then it means in this case "expensive", "an expensive dress."

However in Walloon the opposite is true., so you'll find the adjectives first:

on foirt ome; ene blanke majhon (Walloon)

un homme fort; une maison blanche (French)

a strong man; a white house (English)

When it comes to speaking, Walloon's phonology includes sounds, such as 'tch' and 'dj', that do not exist in French. (Speaking of 'dj', and I have also seen 'cz', that seems more Slavic... French with Slavic and Norwegian influences)

The word "cow" is "vache" in French, and "vatche" in Walloon.

The word "leg" is "jambe" in French, and "djambe" in Walloon.

The word "yellow" is "jaune" in French, and "djaene" in Walloon. (think jaundice)

You'll notice that hyphens (-) and apostrophes (’) are used much more than in French. For a good overview of diacritic (accent) marks see this Merriam-Webster page that explains the markings above and below letters.

When it comes to investigating phrases you might have heard, using google translate and clicking the speaker icon so you can hear how it sounds is very helpful. You will come across words that don't translate to anything close to what you might have heard. At first you might attribute this to the differences between modern day French and Walloon. However many times you'll get really close to what you heard if you investigate synonyms for the word or words that don't seem to fit.

Let's look at a common mildly vulgar phrase that means "my god anyway." My first attempt to write this was "mon dieu po sa." You should notice that "dieu", would equate to deity or God. When you put the English "my god anyway" into translate you get "mon dieu en tout cas." So you know the word "anyway" is not right. Substitute the synonym "however" for "anyway" and you get "pourtant". Again click the speaker icon to hear it and you'll recognize this is right. (French words look funny to us English folks.)

Another is "kiss my ass". "Kiss" in French translates to "embrasser", where as the rest "my ass" is "ma cul" which sounded right when I had google say it. So I looked for synonyms. "Buss" is a synonym for kiss, and then you get closer to how its really spelled.. "buss ma cul".

Again all this gives you the modern day French spelling and sound when you use the speaker icon to hear it. This is not how it's spelled in Walloon nor necessarily how it's said, but for us English speakers this is likely as close as we can get. And if you write it this way, at least down the road should you forget what "mon dieu pourtant" means, at least you'll be able to figure it out. And that at the present time is what I am after. A way to write down what I heard in a way that I can later reference and figure it out. Eventually we will have Kelly Biers' Wisconsin Walloon orthography will focus on a standard way to write it for us English speakers that makes more sense to us.

The classic example is the term "booyah." This is one of the few Belgian words that seems to have an accepted English spelling. It appears to be a variant of "bouillon". It is thought to have derived from the Walloon language words for "boil" (bouillir) and "broth" (bouillon). The spelling with an H has been attributed to phonetic spelling by Wallonian immigrants from Belgium.

Wikitongues

 Interesting project I stumbled upon; 

Wikitongues is building a seedbank of linguistic diversity by crowdsourcing video oral histories, audio files, and lexicon documents. Read our archival policy to learn about our preservation methods, or submit your own video."  

Much to my surprise a young man, Thomas Thibaut submitted a video on the Walloon language.   

What we know

What follows is a short email that I slapped together to share with a couple of my cousins. They'd ask "how do you know that?".... Sadly I haven't been able to determine with Marcel died, so I never really put the finishing touches on what follows. 

What we know, and how. 

There are a few big names when it comes to what we know about our Belgian ancestors. What we know today is built on a lot of shoulders. Sometimes it's interesting to stop and research the researchers. Hopefully knowing a bit about them can inspire others. 

One of the earliest sources was Charles I. Martin (1857-1894), who wrote on the History of Door county in 1881. His book biographies of nearly seven hundred families, and mention of 4,000 persons. 

Mathias Tlachac Sr (1829-1924), Born in Bohemia, dying in Door County. His interest in genealogy and history later led him to write a series of 10 articles about The History of the Belgian settlements in Door, Kewaunee and Brown counties. They were printed after his death in 1973 by the Algoma Record-Herald. 

Hjalmar Rued Holand (1872-1963) A Norwegian-American historian and author of a number of books and numerous articles principally dealing with the history of Door County. ie. Wisconsin's Belgian Community in 1931. 

There are three big names of recent times that come to mind. 

The first was Mary Ann Defnet (1930-2016) of Green Bay. She was a founding member of the Bay Area Genealogical Society, Vice-President and Historian of the Peninsula Belgian-American Club, a member of the Brown County Historical Society, the Belgian Researchers, the Wallonie-Wisconsin Society, the Center for Belgian Culture, and was a 35 year member of the Wisconsin State Genealogical Society. 

She researched and wrote the entire Belgian section of the “Farewell to the homeland: European immigration to N.E. Wisconsin, 1840-1900” She spent countless days at the UWGB research center where all the delcations of intent and other documents are filed. She compiled a list of all the Belgian’s who settled in the area with their dates of arrival. 

Father Jean Ducat (1922-2016) of Biesme, Belgium is a gentleman from Belgium who compiled lists of Belgian passengers who left for America. He was a parish priest and later a professor of Catholic doctrine at the Gosselies State College. He was president of the Archeo-Paleonto-Historique de Charleroi and member of the Wallonie -Wisconsin Association. He worked with Mary. 

Marcel Lacourt of (1924-?) Vitrival, Belgium created a list of over 18,000 Belgians who left the country and came to the US. His spreadsheet denotes birth dates, origin, ship names, landing port, destination. (He died about 2010-12), I am still trying to find out) Marcel spent quite some time in Wisconsin doing local research. 

Previously mentioned the Peninsula Belgian-American Club. It was formed in the late 1960’s in Door County. They have been helping arrange trips back to Belgium, at regular intervals. This started in the early 70’s with hundreds of Belgian Americans going back to reconnect. The Wallonie-Wisconsin association, is the sister organization in Belgium, for those looking to reconnect and visit here. 

Also definitely worth mentioning is The Belgian Researchers. It was founded in 1976 by Micheline Gaudette and Ardiena Stegen. They publish Belgian Laces. This publication has the stories of Belgian immigrants, their role and contribution to the development of particular industries in the US as well as their stories of the trials and tribulations connected with starting a new life in a new country. A special feature of the magazine is the "Queries", in which members desiring information about a particular person or event can submit a query in the hope that someone will be able to help. 

There are many other people and sources, but these are just a few off the stop of my head. When looking into other ethnic backgrounds, similarly looking into who and what has been others have done is probably the most important piece of help you will have. Step one is always to visit the library of the area you are researching. Visit the local history / genealogy department and ask the librarian what they have that no one else has in their reference section.

Milking/Farm Work - Arlene Jadin

 

Wisconsin Walloon notes

 A recent (Jan 2021) paper from Kelly Biers titled "Notes From The Field: Wisconsin Walloon Documentation And Orthography" is worth a read.

The first thing I noticed and was pleased to see is that this paper has the Creative Commons license.

It always bugs me when obscure research papers are published and are basically inaccessible.  They get locked behind paywalls with someone other than the actual authors being the ones who profit.  And what is more disgusting is often time the research was funded by tax payer funded grants.

/End Rant.

What follows are some things I have highlighted from the paper:

Walloon is a threatened language in the langue d’oïl family spoken in southern Belgium. There are perhaps as few as 300,000 active speakers in Belgium, where the language is sometimes considered to be a French patois (Eberhard et al. 2020), although attitudes vary by region (cf. Hambye & Simon 2004). In Wisconsin’s southern Door Peninsula, a small, rural community of descendants of Belgian immigrants have spoken Walloon since the mid nineteenth century. There are fewer than 50 native speakers of this dialect today.

-

No conventionalized writing system for Walloon was used in Belgium until after 1900, after the major mid-century waves of immigration had taken place. Many of the original settlers were illiterate, and those who were literate read and wrote in French. Walloon remained the preferred language in the home for several generations, while French proficiency declined within a generation.

-

Some common words are consistently written for advertising events like Belgian Days. Contemporary Belgian Walloon orthographies are largely based on French spelling conventions, with spelling and diacritic marks that distinguish it from French, but few Wisconsin Walloon speakers have studied these writing systems....  Wautlet’s Phonetic Walloon for Belgian Americans (1983) and Petit Dictionaire de Wallon have heavy French influence, using diacritic marks and spelling conventions which many English literate community members have admitted to finding unclear.

..some spellings have evolved through usage. For instance, in Belgian Walloon, the aforementioned chicken stew is written as bouyon, but booyah has been used on menus in Wisconsin for years. A popular card game, couillon in Belgian Walloon, is advertised as cooyah.

-

Languages spoken in immigrant communities in the United States tend to Anglicize over the course of three generations..

Walloon, however, maintained its status as a primary language in this community for nearly a century before the community began shifting to English. The last generation of native speakers of Wisconsin Walloon were born between approximately 1920 and 1945 mostly acquiring English when they began attending public school around the age of six. Predominantly, this generation did not acquire French in the home, even if one parent was bilingual in French and Walloon.

-

Most children born after 1945 grew up bilingual in Walloon and English but preferred English in most contexts and established monolingual households (cf. Alba et al. 2002). This generation has varying degrees of fluency in Walloon. Some members of this generation remain fluent bilinguals who can communicate with their relatives in Belgium. Some adult children of native speakers are fluent second-language speakers of Walloon. That is, they see themselves as English speakers who later learned or acquired Walloon as a second language, rather than as native bilinguals. Others are passive speakers, or adult learners who comprehend spoken Walloon but have limited spoken fluency themselves, and some are developing adult learners, who grew up only knowing basic vocabulary but have recently volunteered to learn the language in classes and conversation clubs with native speakers.

After reading this paper, I began to think larger about language in general.  I begin to wonder how well people communicated years ago.  I think about how in 1952 the Wisconsin Belgians sought to communicate back home.  Context is key.  In 1950, many households in Wisconsin were maybe just starting to talk English as their primary language.  By this time most if not all of the 1st generation Belgian-American's who could write in French were gone.  Most people in Belgium didn't start learning English till about the late 70's.

By the 1950's the Walloon language in Belgium was being replaced by French.  This adoptation was gradual, actually starting shortly after many left to come to America.  But after WWII, school became manditory in Belgium, and French was taught.

The Wisconsin Belgians origionally sought two way contact via ham radio in 1952, but the sun spot numbers weren't in favor, so they ended up sending a recording to Radio-Namur.

Traveling By Horse Drawn Sleigh - Emily Dhuey