[BRIEF NOTE] The Walloon Language versus La Francophonie
The French language as it now exists is the product of centuries of regulation by the French state. Whether monarchical or republican, the French state has always been quite aware that language is a critical area of culture that can be managed by the state, with benefits naturally accruing to the state. Eugen Weber in his Peasants into Frenchmen described how the schools and conscription of the Third Republic worked together with mass media to produce a nationally consolidated and homogeneous body; almost a century later, France took advantage of Québécois assertiveness and post-colonial Africa's desire to establish multilateral relations amongst themselves to create la francophonie.

As INED noted in February 2002, the result of this centuries-long process of state intervention in language, within the confines of metropolitan France, has been to establish a population far more homogeneously Francophone than ever before: The languages of earlier immigrants (Poles, Jews, Italians) have faded, the languages of more recent immigrants (Arabic, Kabyle, Portuguese) are following suit, langue d'oïl non-standard dialects and all of the dialects of Occitan being only slightly more vulnerable to attrition than full-fledged regional languages like Breton, Basque, Flemish, and Alsatian. This homogenization of France might well be the most important event in the linguistic history of 20th century western Europe.

France remains the central player in the Francophone world, thanks to its moderately large population and its high level of development. That said, where French sovereignty stops the French language continues to display a certain diversity. In Africa, French may be less solidly implanted in former Belgian colonies like Congo-Kinshasa and Rwanda than in formerly French colonies Côte d'Ivoire or Senegal, and it remains unlikely that French will ever become as dominant in any African countries as Portuguese in Angola. Nonetheless, African French remains a vital branch of the French language, evolving of necessity outside of the purview of France. Looking among first-language speakers, the Frenches of Québec and Acadia remain vibrant and distinct, though Léandre Bergeron's 1980 "Dictionnaire de la langue québécoise is agreed to make an argument that's a bit too strong. The standard French spoken by the Belgians and the Swiss is much closer to the French standard than anything spoken outside of Europe, as one would expect given geography and history. This is a bit surprising in the case of the Walloons, for they have their own language.



The Walloon language descends, like the other langues d'oïl, from the Romance dialects imported into what was once the north of Roman Gaul. Heavily influenced by German in its lexicon and its syntax (compare Walloon on foirt ome (a strong man) with French un homme fort, and the construction Cwè çki c' est di ça po ene fleur (what is this flower?) with German Was ist das für eine Blume?), a distinctive Walloon tongue was recognized as early as the 16th century. Unfortunately, as Jacques Marchal observes at his excellent page on the Walloon language, from the 17th century on Wallonia's educated elites wrote and spoken in French. Fluency in Walloon collapsed sharply in the first half of the 20th century, creating a situation where the future of Walloon as a spoken language is threatened on the time-honoured pattern of language decline everywhere.

Then the rest of the population saw that there was no social future outside French, which was the sole language in Walloon schools; all parents began raising their children in French (or often in a dialectal form of French more or less inspired by Walloon). Now, the extremity of the functional deadend is near, with some people claiming that Walloon should be reverred only as a relic of the past, a literary language or, at best, "the language of the heart", but not of everyday speech.

Ethnologue estimates that as of 1998, a bit more than a million people out of a total population of some 3.35 million people in Wallonia. There is a notable Walloon language movement, with the Union culturel wallon leading efforts to introduce Walloon into the mass media and education. Unquestionably, Walloon's search for official status is aided immeasurably by Wallonia's independence from France; had Wallonia remained French territory after 1815, doubtless it would have met the same fate as Picard.

Even so, considering the inverted age pyramid of Walloon speakers and Walloon's apparently weak penetration outside of folkloric circles, a certain skepticism regarding this language's fate seems merited. Québécois and Acadian Frenches are likely to survive thanks to their distance from la métropole while African French can soon count--if it can't already--on sheer weight of its numbers. Wallonia exists in a borderless Europe, outnumbered twenty to one by their southern neighbours. The Walloon language faces even worse numeric odds. La Francophonie may yet triumph in Belgium.