French Flemish

The dialect's status appears to be moribund,[4] but there has been an active movement to retain French Flemish in the region.

Jean-Paul Couché, chairman of the Akademie voor Nuuze Vlaemsche Taele (ANVT), argues:[1] Linguistically, a dialect depends on a larger, national language.

We are not connected to standard Dutch because it is an artificial language that was created based on the dialects of North Holland.

However, that is not the case for Dutch and German dialects spoken at both sides of the Dutch-German border.

On the other hand, the private Catholic education began teaching standard Dutch in collèges in Gravelines and Hondschoote.

Historic regression of Dutch in the Western periphery. The blue line indicates the situation in the 7th–8th century; the red line marks the situation during the 20th century; the black line is the current French-Belgian border.
Flemish (green) and French (red/brown) as spoken in the arrondissement of Dunkirk in 1874 and 1972
Bilingual sign at the entrance to the village of Renescure (between Saint-Omer and Hazebrouck )