History, Wonder Tales, Fairy Tales, Myths and Legends The Flemish | Page 307

Linguistic Innovations in the Flemish Dialect from Language Contact with
French
As a consequence of the retreat of the linguistic border during many centuries over the
north of Pas-de-Calais and the arrondissement of Dunkirk generations and
generations of bilinguals practised code-switching and consequently mixed up
elements of the two languages. Vestiges of the influence of substrate Flemish on the
Picard dialect in the north of Pas-de-Calais and by extension in the whole region are
quoted in Callebaut and Ryckeboer (1997) and in Ryckeboer (1997). As Picard and
later French were the languages with the greater prestige, borrowing from these
languages into Flemish was more important than vice versa.
As early as 1886 a schoolmaster from Armboutscappel, filling out the Willems dialect
inquiry, calls his language ‘a terrible jargon, a mixture of Flemish and French’
(Ryckeboer, 1989).
Vandenberghe (1998) investigated a corpus of French Flemish dialect conversations,
that were registered during the 1960s. It comes as no surprise that she was able to
demonstrate a much larger linguistic interference (both lexical and grammatical) of
French in the Flemish dialect in France than in the neighbouring West Flemish on the
Belgian side of the border. Only half of the lexical loans recorded in France were also
known to be used in Belgium (303 out of 611, to be exact).
An example of the penetration of many French loanwords is the rendering of the
concept ‘to threaten’. The original Flemish (be-/ ver-) dreigen has been replaced by
the loan-word menasseren, except in a small strip along the Belgian border (see Map
4).
The most revealing outcome was that in French Flanders far fewer loanwords are
phonetically ormorphologically adapted to the Flemish dialect: out of a total of 228
adapted loanwords, 184 (80%) are alsoknown in West Flanders; but out of a total of
383non-adapted loanwords, only 119 (30%) are also known in Belgium. Moreover the
domains are significant: they belong to e.g. modern agricultural techniques
(écrèmeuse, veleuse, inséminateur), modernmedicine (tumeur), education
(composition), modern jobs (assistant social), modern apparatuses and structures
(appareil de photo, coup de téléphone, feuille d’impots, marché commun), etc.
Even the Flemish denominations for animals that have become rare (and that
consequently are known only from books) have disappeared: the swan is called a
cygne and no longer zwaan (see WVD III, 1, Vogels); the tortoise (Dutch/Flemish
schildpad) is known only as tortue (see WVD III, 2 Land en Waterfauna).
The adapted loan words, however, mostly refer to the world of a traditional, even oldfashioned way of life, and the concepts referred to date back to a period when French
still had very much the same prestige on both sides of the state border (e.g. bassing,
baskule, dokteur, sinteure, etc.). For the concepts where on the French side,
unadapted loanwords from the French standard are used, mostly standard Dutch
words will be used on the Belgian side(moissoneuse batteuse – pikdorser; conseil
municipal – gemeenteraad, whereas the archaic common dialect word for the latter
was ‘de wet‘).

307