What's a Walloon and Why Does It Matter

To understand the language you need to understand the history. As the language is older than the country, being as that only became it's own in 1830.

What follows is an excerpt from Chapter I: What's a Walloon and Why Does It Matter? by Judith Carlsen

Belgium is the country of our origins, and Belgium is a very small country, approximately the size of Maryland. One would think that designating our forebears as Belgian would be sufficient.

Yet Belgium has always been a divided country. It has long been fought over and subdivided by larger surrounding nations, rather like a solitary bone among a pack of hungry dogs. There are relics of civilizations from earliest antiquity associated with the area we know today as Belgium. The first named inhabitants were the Belgae. These people groups were Celtic tribes that settled the European landmass about 500 BC.

By 51 BC, the Belgae were overtaken by Julius Caesar's armies. Caesar referred to the Belgae as "the bravest of all the Gauls," and Belgium, or Belgica, flourished as a Roman province. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, Germanic tribes invaded. The Franks, one of these Germanic tribes, eventually took over Belgium and installed Clovis I as king of the dynasty. After he converted to Christianity he recruited Irish monks and other Christian scholars to preach Christianity to the Belgium populace.

Spain and the Vikings had their turns in conquering and ruling Belgium. Charlemagne was born near Leige, Belgium and he brought a huge part of Europe under his rule. He was crowned "Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire" in the year 800. As his empire lost its power in the 11th and 12th centuries, the country we know as Belgium was divided into separate states. These feudal states correspond roughly to the provinces of Belgium from which our ancestors emigrated. It's important to note that the country is divided, geographically, into two halves, roughly corresponding to the language that is spoken : Flemish, the language of the northern, more populous, half, has Germanic-Dutch derivation, while Walloon, a regional dialog with similarities to French, is the dominant language of the southern half. The populace of each half has genetic kinship to their neighboring country, whether it be Holland or France.

History of the French Phonology

I stumbled upon a pretty good History of the French Phonology in a paper titled "The French Phonological Corpus with Equivalents in English, German and Turkish, as Part of a New Multilingual Dictionary Project" by Dr Metin Yurtbaşı, it starts at page 4 of: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED579983.pdf

In Quebec, the French they speak there is closer to our Walloon. In any event a number of Quebecois Canadian's have noted that they understand our Wisconsin Walloon videos better than the French they speak in France. The things to consider is the much earlier time period of when the French Canadian's left France (mostly 15-16th century), and for that matter it's worth noting there are some Quebecois Canadian's who have Belgian ancestors, so they weren't all from France.

I recommend reading through page 7, if not the whole paper. I'll share some excerpts here:

1 Gallo-Romance (5th-8th centuries)
The Vulgar Latin in Gaul has developped specific features that made it distinct from the Latin spoken in the other regions of the Roman empire. The Reichenau Glosses are a good example of its phonetics and vocabulary.

2 Old French (9th-13th centuries)
The dialects of Northern Gaul developed into separate language (Langue d'oil, see below) with a grammar of its own. The first written materials in it date from the Strasbourg Oaths of 842. The Old French literature flourished since the 10th century (chansons de geste etc.). French in this period was already taught in the neighboring countries (especially in Germany). In 11th13th centuries it was the dominant language of the English administration. It was, also, the language of the crusaders in the Levantine countries.

3 Middle French (14th-15th centuries)
This period was marked by changes both in the pronunciation and in the grammar. A common literary language, based on the dialect of Île de France (the region of Paris), was promoted by the writers. French was replacing Latin in the texts of the public administration in France.

4 Early Modern French (16th century)
The aim of the writers of this period, as is the case of the poets of La Pléiade, was to elevate the French language to the level of Latin as a medium for literary expression, In 1539 a royal decree proclaimed French official language of the public administration. Since that period the government was always involved in the development and the standardization of the language.

5 Classical Modern French (17th-18th century)
In this period were fixed the main grammar convention of the modern French. By then it was used as an international language throughout Europe and even in the administrative correspondence of countries as Germany. With the colonial expansion of France French spread to America (Canada, Louisiana, the Caribbean islands etc.)

6 Contemporary Modern French (since 19th century)
The contemporary pronunciation of the standard language was fixed in that period, namely between 1789 and 1918. French was established as an official language in the French and Belgian colonial possessions in Africa (ibid).

Now that you have the basics on the History of the French Phonology, here is a a side-by-side recorded comparison that I have pieced together for those curious about the differences between spoken Walloon and French.

https://archive.org/details/spoken-walloon-french-comparison

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.

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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.

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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.