History, Wonder Tales, Fairy Tales, Myths and Legends The Flemish | Page 300

Flemish in the North of France
Hugo Ryckeboer - University of Ghent, Department of Dutch Linguistics, Blandijnberg 2, BE9000 Ghent, Belgium

Some of the oldest sources of the Dutch language originate from the north of
France, where also a lot of place names and family names give evidence of the
historical presence of Dutch in that region, although it was mostly called there
Flemish. It was replaced there by old French in its Picard form from the 11th
century onwards. The gradual transition of language and the corresponding
moving up of the language border lasted for about a thousand years. That border
did not coincide with political borders, e.g. between the counties of Artesia and
Flanders.
After the annexation of great parts of Flanders by Louis XI Vin the 16thcentury a
slow Frenchification of what is now the arrondissement of Dunkirk began. But
Dutch continued to play its role as a cultural language until the French
Revolution. The legislation about language use in education and administration
hastened the Frenchification of the upper class in the 19th century, especially in
the towns. But it was not earlier than the period between the two world wars and
mainly after the Second World War that the oral Flemish dialect was increasingly
given up. As a result, its disappearance is imminent.
Introduction
One of the oldest preserved sentences in Western Old Dutch, a love poem written
down in Rochester in Kent in the late 11th century (the text says Hebban olla vogala
nestas hagunnan, hinasi hic anda thu (Have all birds begun their nests except you and
me)) is attributed to an author originating from what is now northern France
(Gysseling, 1980: 126–130). And indeed, the northern part of the present-day French
region Nord – Pas-de-Calais used to be part of the Dutch language territory or – as far
as the ‘arrondissement’ Dunkirk in the ‘département du Nord’ is concerned – is still
part of it today. One of the most visible and explicit signs of this belonging are the
many Dutch place and family names in this northern French region.
The Historical Retreat of Dutch from Pas-de-Calais
Those Dutch names in the Nord – Pas-de-Calais region are the last remnants of a
larger Old Dutch and Middle Dutch speaking area in the Middle Ages, situated to the
north of the linguistic border between Romance and Germanic languages, that had its
course much further to the west and the south than today along a line that in the ninth
century was going from the mouth of the Canche to just north of the city of Lille, where
it coincided with the present language frontier in Belgium.
The reconstruction of the course of the original language border by M. Gysseling is
founded on the respective Romance or Germanic phonetic evolution of the placenames, dating back to the seventh and eighth centuries in that bilingual region
(Gysseling, 1976).
The origin of that primary language boundary seems to have been a consequence of a
Late-Roman defence system along the route from Boulogne to Cologne, that had

300