Difference Between Walloon And French
1.1.1 Walloon and French – an Ancient Relationship
Nowadays, the diglossic situation in Wallonia is characterized by a clear hegemony of French over Walloon, with no monolingual Walloon speakers and a rapidly decreasing population of speakers, Nevertheless, it is pertinent to specify that Walloon successfully managed to survive French pressures over a long period of time.
Distributive Linguistic Functionality in Evolution
The first testimonies of a French presence in Wallonia date from the beginning of the 13th century, and they were produced in a religious or an administrative context. In parallel with the rest of Europe, the other written language of that period was Latin, whereas Walloon solely existed in oral communication (Boutier 2009: 109). It is worth pointing out the existence of typical Walloon characteristics in the written French of this period, which confirms the existence of an oral Walloon, however, texts from this period cannot be analyzed as Walloon, nor do they exactly reflect the spoken language of the population (Remacle 1990: 11). Nevertheless, it is possible …show more content…
Note that the countryside remained largely unperturbed by these changes as they tended to occur in urban areas. To summarize the language usages at the time, one could talk of a complementary distribution rather than diglossia, as there were no clear high and low variety (Hudson 2002: 6-10). Regarding the distributive functionality of the languages in presence, we witnessed the emergence of a modest community of urban and cultivated French speakers, of which a faction started writing in Walloon for entertainment, even though French predominated written communication. On the other hand, Walloon continued to be the primary language of oral communication of the majority (Boutier 2009:
Nowadays, the diglossic situation in Wallonia is characterized by a clear hegemony of French over Walloon, with no monolingual Walloon speakers and a rapidly decreasing population of speakers, Nevertheless, it is pertinent to specify that Walloon successfully managed to survive French pressures over a long period of time.
Distributive Linguistic Functionality in Evolution
The first testimonies of a French presence in Wallonia date from the beginning of the 13th century, and they were produced in a religious or an administrative context. In parallel with the rest of Europe, the other written language of that period was Latin, whereas Walloon solely existed in oral communication (Boutier 2009: 109). It is worth pointing out the existence of typical Walloon characteristics in the written French of this period, which confirms the existence of an oral Walloon, however, texts from this period cannot be analyzed as Walloon, nor do they exactly reflect the spoken language of the population (Remacle 1990: 11). Nevertheless, it is possible …show more content…
Note that the countryside remained largely unperturbed by these changes as they tended to occur in urban areas. To summarize the language usages at the time, one could talk of a complementary distribution rather than diglossia, as there were no clear high and low variety (Hudson 2002: 6-10). Regarding the distributive functionality of the languages in presence, we witnessed the emergence of a modest community of urban and cultivated French speakers, of which a faction started writing in Walloon for entertainment, even though French predominated written communication. On the other hand, Walloon continued to be the primary language of oral communication of the majority (Boutier 2009: