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