A great documentary about the Wallon language (in French)

[nooj]

Reasons to watch: A great mise en scène. Great music. Very informative. A positive outlook (I read in an interview that this was purposeful on the part of the director, minority languages are often depicted in very gloomy terms).

Notice the gentleman who lives in Morocco and speaks Wallon to everyone. He raises his child in the language.The Moroccans treat it as any other language. In 21st century Belgium or France the idea of raising your kid in Wallon is seen as -at best- useless by most people, if not foolish. He speaks very good Moroccan Arabic, as well. This speaker of a minority language has integrated better into the society than most French people I met while living in Morocco, people who had been there for years and never learned more than the numbers and greetings in Moroccan Arabic or Berber. The problem there is that they (generally) don't really want to integrate into Moroccan society and they have the money to isolate themselves.

There is a small community of Wallon speakers in the USA as well.

One thing that really brought me to the edge of tears was the children. You know the movie Children of Men? It ends with the sound of the laughter of children, in a bleak world where there has been no children for years.

Well that's pretty much daily life for native speakers of Wallon, whose social circle of speakers shrinks to perhaps their children or if they're in an elderly home, with the people around them. The sense of isolation only increases if they live in rural areas. Everywhere around the world is witnessing 'rural flight'. Someone was telling me how when they brought their twins to a mountain village in Austria, an elderly woman couldn't stay away and would congratulate her, because it had been decades since a child had been born there. All the young people leave.

There is something emotionally powerful about seeing that link restored: children speaking, playing, laughing in the language with their parents in a home environment. Nothing beats that.

[nooj]

Here is a video about writing Wallon which has subtitles in a unified, written form of Wallon called rfondou walon. Wallon - like all languages - is a collection of language varieties, not a unitary phenomena. It has a lengthy literary history, but no one orthography, let alone one spoken variety, has won out over the rest, so there's still quite a bit of debate. The older Feller system works on the principle that each person can write down how they speak faithfully. This does necessarily introduce a lot of variation, as each person writes down how they pronounce it in their region. Unified Wallon works on the basis that there is one written system for all the varieties. Speakers of different varieties would write the same word, but pronounce it differently. This enforces some kind of common basis in writing, something that they consider a crucial step for the revitalisation of their language. In the 21st century, it is no longer enough to be able to just write down one's varieties phonetically. Their ideology is that they need a standard language, at least written, if it is to have even a hope of fighting against French, as opposed to it getting annihilated piece meal as it is now.

Sorry for the muddle up in the terminology by the way, I guess as I am writing in English, I should say Walloon, not Wallon but the French word has stuck in my brain.



And a very nice little song at the end!

[Carmody]

Thanks so much ; greatly appreciated.