History, Wonder Tales, Fairy Tales, Myths and Legends The Flemish | Page 308
The very profound influence of spoken French on the Flemish dialect in France is also
reflected in the use of many loan adverbs that are unknown in Belgian West Flemish,
especially those ending in -ment, such as extrèmement, complètement, and other
adverbs and interjections, often used as phrasemarkers in French, such as (et) puis,
bien entendu, d’abord, quoi?, etc. Many conjunctions are also borrowed from the
French language, such as: puisque (dat), parce que, soit. They are totally unknown in
Belgian dialects (with the exception of tandis que, which used to be very common in
Belgian West Flemish as well). In addition a number of prepositions that consist of a
partial translation of a French prepositional group are used in French Flemish, but
never in BelgianWest Flemish, such as à force van, grâce van.
The Flemish dialect in France also shows syntactic characteristics that reflect both the
age-old influence of French and the absence of influence from more eastern Dutch,
especially Brabantic, dialects. It appears from many inquiries, especially from the
corpus of recorded conversations which Vandenberghe investigated, that extraposition of some adverbial complements and even inherent complements is very
common in French Flemish. This is impossible in Standard Dutch and less common in
the neighbouring Belgian Flemish dialects as well (see Vanacker, 1973).
Another syntactic feature of the French Flemish dialect is the almost complete
absence of inversion (for 97%) after topicalisation of a non-subject constituent. (I have
also observed this phenomenon in a chronicle of 1813 written by a French Flemish
Napoleon soldier from Winnezele – Ryckeboer & Simon, 2001.) Data collected before
the second World War for theWest Flemish Dialect Atlas (Pée, 1946) showed 76%
absence of inversion in Belgian West Flemish (Vanacker, 1967). Nowadays it is even
less heard there, under the influence of the central Belgian regiolects and the Dutch
standard language. We may conclude, therefore, that the state border has become a
clear linguistic border not only as far as the lexicon but also as far as syntax is
concerned.
Flemish in France: A Case of Language Death
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