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.
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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.
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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.
