French Flemish (, , Standard Dutch: , ) is a West Flemish dialect spoken in the north of contemporary France.
Place names indicate that Flemish was spoken as early as the 8th century in the region of Flanders that was ceded to France at the 1659 Treaty of the Pyrenees. This area became known as French Flanders. Its dialect subgroup, called French Flemish, meanwhile, became a minority dialect that survives mainly in Dunkirk ( in Dutch, in West Flemish, "dune church"), Bourbourg ( in Dutch), Calais (), Saint-Omer (), with its Flemish ethnic enclave of Haut-Pont (Haute-Ponte), and Bailleul ().
French Flemish has about 20,000 daily users, and twice that number of occasional speakers. The dialect's status appears to be moribund, but there has been an active movement to retain French Flemish in the region.
Status Though generally seen as a dialect of Dutch, some of its speakers prefer to call it a regional language. Jean-Paul Couché, chairman of the Akademie voor Nuuze Vlaemsche Taele (ANVT), argues:
Linguistically, a dialect depends on a larger, national language. That does not apply to French Flemish. We are not connected to standard Dutch because it is an artificial language that was created based on the dialects of North Holland. Research shows that the distance between French Flemish and Dutch is greater than that between Dutch and German.
Although French Flemish and West Flemish are together with Limburgish the most distant dialects from Standard Dutch, Standard Dutch and Standard German are more distant still. However, that is not the case for dialects spoken at both sides of the Dutch-German border. This is partly due to the fact that those German dialects are not dialects of High German but of Low German and Low Franconian.
History An earlier form of Flemish was once spoken in what is now metropolitan France over a much wider area than in the 21st century. This is also reflected in the toponymy of Nord-Pas-de-Calais, for instance in the name of the town of Wissant, in which the Flemish Witsant (“white sand”) can easily be recognised.
The chambers of rhetoric testify to an intellectual life in Flemish in French Flanders. These societies, created in the 15th century, organised religious festivities in towns and villages; the chamber of Eecke dates from 1542. They held competitions intended to “maintain the purity of the Flemish language in its form and pronunciation” and to promote poetry in Flemish. These competitions were public. Some chambers survived until the 19th century, and even into the 20th century in the case of the restored chamber of Eecke.
A native of French Flanders, the poet and playwright Michiel de Swaen was a 17th-century Dutch-language writer. In his plays, common people speak Flemish, whereas nobles use a written form strongly influenced by Brabantian and Hollandic.
After the French Revolution, the old Flemish chambers of rhetoric, which had been dissolved like civil and religious corporations, gradually re-established themselves in French Flanders. Louis de Backer notes the reconstitution of the chamber of rhetoric of Hondschoote on 27 Nivôse Year X of the French Republican calendar, as well as the organisation at Bergues of a poetry competition in which the chambers of rhetoric of Kortrijk, Steenvoorde, Steene, Veurne, Moorsele, Poperinge and Hondschoote took part. In the early 19th century, Flemish authors from France were still taking part in literary competitions in Diksmuide and Veurne, including Hubben from Dunkirk, Bertein and Bels from Wormhout, Van Rechem from Hazebrouck and Louis Lecomte from Bailleul.
19th Century The spread of French through schooling was an important factor in the decline of French Flemish in the 19th century. According to Jean-Claude Dupas, teaching in Flemish continued after the French Revolution, despite an initial attempt by the Convention to impose teaching in French. The turning point came in the 19th century, when French gradually became the normal and then exclusive language of primary education.
At the beginning of the 19th century, in the arrondissement of Dunkirk and in that of Hazebrouck, all municipalities were Flemish-speaking, with the exception of three municipalities in the arrondissement of Dunkirk that were exclusively French-speaking, namely Gravelines, Loon and Mardyck, and ten municipalities in the arrondissement of Hazebrouck that were likewise exclusively French-speaking, namely Blaringhem, Boeseghem, Thiennes, Haverskerque, Merville, La Gorgue, Estaires, Neuf-Berquin, Steenwerck and Nieppe. In addition, French was also spoken in Holque and Saint-Momelin, but alongside Flemish, and in the arrondissement of Lille only the municipality of Wervicq-Sud was Flemish-speaking at that time.
According to a letter from the prefect dated 13 September 1806, out of the 671 municipalities in the Nord department, 99 were Flemish-speaking and 572 were French-speaking. Also in 1806, there were reportedly 155,712 speakers of Flemish in the Nord department and 1,261 in Pas-de-Calais. In 1807, according to a letter from a sub-prefect, the inhabitants of Clairmarais, Ruminghem and the suburbs of Saint-Omer continued to speak their “corrupted Flemish”. They used it alongside French, which they practised rather than their Flemish [sic].
In 1833, the law on primary education, known as the Guizot Law, made the teaching of the elements of the French language compulsory in primary schools. Several studies devoted to French Flanders present this date as an important stage in the educational Frenchification of the region: according to Jean-Claude Dupas, it was from 1833 onwards that the State truly sought to limit the use of Flemish in schools; Hugo Ryckeboer also states that from this period onwards Flemish was gradually excluded from education, contributing to the decline of Flemish in the arrondissements of Dunkirk and Hazebrouck, where it nevertheless remained widely spoken among the popular, working-class and agricultural populations.
According to Abel Hugo, around 1835 Flemish was the usual language in the arrondissements of Hazebrouck and Dunkirk. However, all the inhabitants also knew and spoke French, a development he described as a conquest of the Revolution. Fifty years earlier, one would not have found in Flanders one farmer in twenty who could express himself in any language other than his mother tongue.
In 1845, in Pas-de-Calais, the localities of Clairmarais, Saint-Folquin, Le Haut-Pont, Saint-Omer-Cappelle, Oye, Ruminghem and Vieille-Église were places where Flemish was still spoken.
In January 1853, the Academic Council of the Nord department adopted a specific decision concerning the use of Flemish in schools in the arrondissements of Dunkirk and Hazebrouck. Teachers were authorised to teach reading in Flemish alongside reading in French, but only so that children whose mother tongue was Flemish could learn their catechism and prepare for First Communion. All other exercises, however, had to take place in French, and the teacher was required to speak French and not tolerate the use of any other language in the school. This decision, sometimes presented as a ban on Flemish in schools, therefore did not abolish all educational use of the language, but confined it to a religious and transitional function. It formed part of the broader movement of educational Frenchification in the 19th century, at a time when Flemish was still widely used among the popular, working-class and agricultural populations of French Flanders.
In the second half of the 19th century, scholarly defence of French Flemish was organised around local scholars and learned societies. Louis de Backer published several works devoted to the Flemings of France and their language, while the Comité flamand de France, founded in 1853, set itself the task, among others, of studying the language and literature of the Flemings of France.
The Historical Commission of the Nord department in 1845, and the Comité flamand de France in a more complete manner in 1857, recorded the linguistic situation in northern France. It emerged that, out of the 59 municipalities making up the arrondissement of Dunkirk, 40 spoke exclusively Flemish, 2 exclusively French, 5 Flemish and French with Flemish dominant, and 13 French and Flemish with French dominant.
Before their definitive incorporation into France, the inhabitants of the arrondissement of Dunkirk spoke only Flemish. This situation had not changed substantially by 1862. A significant part of the population knew French in 1862, but the majority of the inhabitants, especially those belonging to the working and agricultural classes, continued to speak Flemish at that time.
Around 1863, the language spoken by the inhabitants of the arrondissement of Hazebrouck, especially by the working and agricultural classes, was Flemish. According to a statistical study drawn up in 1857, out of the 53 municipalities making up the arrondissement, 31 spoke exclusively Flemish, 8 exclusively French, 11 Flemish and French with Flemish dominant, and 3 French and Flemish with French dominant.
According to De Backer, the disappearance of the last generations of the 19th century nevertheless marked the decline of Flemish as a written language in France. The language then survived more in oral, popular and festive uses. He notably mentions Tisje-Tasje of Noordpeene, a figure of cabaret and Flemish popular culture who became one of the emblematic giants of Hazebrouck, as well as Verlyck of Hazebrouck, who is said to have enlivened the fairs and kermesses of the region for more than half a century with his jokes, songs and comic dialogues with a puppet named Kô Poulle, which became legendary.
20th Century A 1911 census revealed that 75% of the market gardeners of Saint-Omer spoke West Flemish.
At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the decline of French Flemish formed part of a broader context of educational and administrative Francization. In schools, the use of Flemish was gradually associated with a popular, rural or archaic speech form, in contrast to French, which was presented as the language of education, social advancement and national unity. Testimonies report punishments imposed on pupils caught speaking Flemish, including the use of the “symbol” or signum: the child at fault was given an object, which he or she could pass on to another pupil by denouncing them in turn; whoever still had the object at the end of the day was punished. Other accounts mention humiliations, such as rinsing the mouth with cold water, intended to wash away the “bad” Flemish words. Inscriptions such as “Défense de parler flamand” (“Speaking Flemish forbidden”) or “Il est interdit de parler flamand et d’uriner sur les murs” (“It is forbidden to speak Flemish and to urinate on the walls”) are regularly cited as traces of this educational and social stigmatization.
In French Flanders, this linguistic pressure was combined with the conflict between republican schooling and Catholic circles. After the law of 9 December 1905 concerning the separation of the Churches and the State, the defence of Flemish could become, in some clerical or Catholic circles, a way of resisting republican secularization. The local language retained a religious and communal function: it continued to be used in families, in some parish contexts, in local relations and in rural areas. Conversely, for some republican authorities, Flemish appeared as one of the signs of a rural, Catholic and peripheral world that had to be more firmly integrated into the French nation through school, administration and military service.