AHC: Belgian Language
- Thread starter SuperTechmarine
- Start date
I understood it using a mix of French and Italian. It's quite confusing from a solely French perspective IMO.
Ehhhh.....languages don't really work like that. At best you can have Flemish with a huge influx of French/Walloon words, like Norman French into English, or vice versa. I don't know why the language would be called "Belgian" though, unless they renamed either Flemish or Walloon as Belgian.
I don't think conditions would be right for the creation of a creole, either.
I don't think conditions would be right for the creation of a creole, either.
AFAIK Walloon is even more Germanic than French, however it's a rather small language, IIRC 600,000 with 300,000 active speakers, whereas the Walloon region has a population of about 4,000,000 (in comparison the Flemish region has a population of 6,000,000).
Yeah, but linguistically it is still too French to be a mixed French/Dutch language. Whether French and Walloon are mutually intelligible or not is irrelevant to that point.
Burton K Wheeler
Moderator
Something like modern Turkish that was imposed on the population is possible, if there were some kind of Belgian Ataturk. The thing is, it would either be bastardized French or bastardized Flemish. Half the population would refuse to speak what they saw as the other half's language and the other half would refuse to speak a mutilated version of their own.
Plus, until WWI at least, French had international prestige like English today. That's like saying South Africans would create a hybrid language of their 11 official ones and teach that as a second language nationwide instead of English. It wouldn't make native speakers of any language happy.
No, Walloon is another language d'oil tongue, more like a sister language than a dialect.
The difference between a language is rather arbitrary, extremely political and completely unimportant. It realy doesn't matter if Walloon is a French dialect or an independent language. Walloon is not some kind of Franco-Dutch hybrid, which I believe is impossible to create and become anything more than a curiosity like esperanto. Basicly languages grow naturally and such a language would be too artificial to be accepted by the general population.
The oïl languages (Norman, Picard, Walloon, Champennois, et al.) are not the same thing as dialects of French. They developed at the same time French did, from a common Gallo-Romance ancestor.
The dialects of French (Belgian French, Swiss French, Meridional French, etc.) on the other hand are descended from French itself, having diverged at various points in the last half-millennium.
If it were a family tree, Walloon would be French's brother or sister, while Belgian French is its child.
Below is an overview of the different dialects of d'oïl. None of the dialects are the same, neither Walloon nor the other dialects. They all descend from Old French.
Remember the old saying by Max Weinreich: «A schprakh iz a diyalekt mit an armey un flot» (A language is a dialect with an army and fleet) There is a tendency to consider something a separate language if a bunch of dialects belong to a separate nation. This is of course a totally unscientific view. Often a countrry makes its own written standard, but a separate written standard does not in itself make it a separate language. For this reason for instance Norwegian, Swedish and Danish should be considered a single language, Scandinavian.