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)