Acceso usuarios
Michel Francard
Wallonia (Romance Belgium) is the Oïl region where French today is most exposed to regional languages. This situation is all the more remarkable because this same Wallonia took part very early in the development of French beyond its original geographical area. This article addresses, firstly, the question of the relationship between the regional endogenous languages of Wallonia, on the one hand, and French, on the other, from the expansion of the latter in the Middle Ages until today. It aims, secondly, to analyze the present vitality of Wallonia's vernacular languages, examining the clear decline relative to the situation at the start of the twentieth century, several decades of indifference or even hostility, and more recently the marked renewal of interest by Walloons in their ancestral languages.
