History of the term Wallon

[4]This phrase explicitly highlights the Germanic origin of the term, which likely stems from a Frankish word of the time derived from the much older name Walh, dating back to Proto-Germanic in the 4th century BCE.

It refers to the entire Romance-speaking population of Gaul,[5] but its lexical scope quickly narrows to designate only the speakers of a langue d'oïl, that is, the inhabitants of Neustria.

There is no mention of the Germanic origin of the adjective Vallonicae, which could indicate that it had entered common usage in this bilingual diocese, straddling both Romance and Germanic-speaking regions.

In 1447, Jean Wauquelin, a translator "native to the land of Picardy", used wallec and its variants wallecq and wallet in his prose version of the legend of Gérard de Roussillon.

He also employed ro(u)man, franc(h)ois, and langue maternelle to describe this language, without distinguishing it from French or a dialect, and without linking it to either written or spoken forms.

[N 5] Before the 14th century, the verb walesquier ("to speak an incomprehensible language") also appears,[N 6] notably in the Roman de Cassidorus by an author believed to be Baudoin Butor.

Wallon seems to have been a semi-scholarly creation that replaced an earlier term of the same etymological origin, more closely related to wal(l)ec than to walois, modeled after tiesson... whose earliest record, coincidentally, is from the Hainuyer Froissart.

In 1530, the English linguist John Palsgrave referred to Wallon in his Esclaircissement de la langue françoyse as the French spoken in the Burgundian Netherlands.

This is evident in the 1963 Larousse du XXe siècle, which defines Wallons as the population of the southeastern half of Belgium (excluding the Arlon district in Belgian Luxembourg), extending into neighboring French departments such as Nord, Aisne, and Ardennes.

[30]Nonetheless, Albert Henry concludes that by 1963, the Burgundian meaning described by Feller had fallen out of use, and the term Wallons now simply refers to the inhabitants of Wallonia.

He writes: It is probably from Pasquier that Jean Bodin drew inspiration when he wrote this learned etymological anecdote, already noted by Stengers in 1948: "Ouallonnes enim a Belgis appelamur [we, the "Gauls"], quod Gallis veteribus contigit, quum orbem terrarum peragrarent, ac mutuo interrogantes quaererent ou allons-nous, id est quonam proficiscimur?

[38]In contrast, Bossuet offered a more honorable tribute in his Funeral Oration for the Prince of Condé: "The enemy army is stronger, it is true; it is composed of those veteran Walloon, Italian, and Spanish bands that no one had ever managed to break.

[40] Walloon church Calvinists from the Southern Netherlands fled religious wars and settled abroad, particularly in the Dutch Republic and its colonies (as well as in England[41] and Germany).

In his book Histoire des mots Wallon et Wallonie, Albert Henry lists numerous instances of the term valón and its derivatives in Cervantes' works, particularly in Don Quixote and Rinconete et Cortadillo: In Spain, the linguistic borrowing most strikingly demonstrates the renown of the Walloon regiments.

The Walloon troops, recruited from regions less dominated by commerce and frequently serving as the theater of war near France, gained renown for their martial spirit and formed the elite of the armies of Philip and his descendants.

[47] In the Dictionnaire de Trévoux (1752), Wallon, -onne is defined as: "Meaning Gaulish, referring to all the peoples of the Netherlands whose native language is an old form of French: such as those from Artois, Hainaut, Namur, Luxembourg, and parts of Flanders and Brabant.

As Albert Henry noted, Wallons began to symbolize: "Men born in Wallonia, who live there or, having emigrated to Brussels as adults, continue to have the consciousness and desire to remain, sentimentally and culturally, what they were.

[52] Linguists, as Henry acknowledged, often found it difficult to discern whether the term Wallon in older texts referred to a dialect or a regionalized form of French.

[54] One of the first significant distinctions came from the German philologist Wilhelm Altenburg, who clarified that the Walloon dialect could not be limited to the Liège region nor extended to the Picard-speaking areas.

[57] This marked the final semantic narrowing of the term Wallon and Wallonia, now referring more specifically to dialectal reality, though still holding a broader political meaning within Belgium's linguistic divide.

The first recognized[N 10] mention of the term Wallonie appeared in November 1842 in the Essai d'étymologie philosophique by the philologist and anthropologist from Namur, Abbé Honoré Chavée.

Chavée likely based his usage on the older meaning of the word wallon:[69] Renown (often unjustly) for a long time has had a voice to proclaim the preeminence of Germany in the field of philology, and does not repeat the great names that France, or, more accurately, Wallonia, can inscribe in the temple of scholarship.

"[71][71] This view is supported by Jean Germain, who agreed that there is no direct relationship between this use of Wallonia and the Wallonie that emerged politically and culturally in the 19th century in the context of the newly formed Belgian state.

It wasn't until 1886 that the term gained some visibility, thanks to Albert Mockel: he adopted it as the title for his literary journal La Wallonie, launched that year in Liège.

Linguists like Alphonse Maréchal,[78] Charles Bruneau, and others, including the cartographers Elmer Bagby Atwood [fr] and Louis Remacle, helped delineate what Albert Henry[79] called Wallonie dialectale.

The linguistic divide reached a tipping point in the 1960s, culminating on December 31, 1970, when the Belgian Constitution was amended to establish not only communities but also regions, including the Région wallonne.

"[83] This wish was partially realized politically; in 2010, the Walloon government adopted a guideline to promote the term "Wallonie" in place of Région wallonne to foster the "birth of a collective consciousness.

For some Walloon activists, such as François Perin [fr], the term Wallonie refers to the French-speaking linguistic region [fr] rather than the official Région wallonne: This refers here to Wallonie in the usual sense of the term, which corresponds to the 'French linguistic region' of Article 3 bis of the Constitution, and not to the official Région wallonne of Article 107 quater of the Constitution, which includes 9 German-speaking communes.

[86]In a "late note", Albert Henry suggests that in the 19th century up until World War II, the term wallon used as a noun was also used in the shipping industry to refer to "a wooden barge (oak and elm), without a keel, with a flat bottom and straight sides, which was reserved for inland navigation in the department of Nord, West Flanders, and Hainaut (?).

Pero no es tan un elegante y pulida como la, que se habla en Paris, y Francia, sinon antigua y Romana corrompida, que llamen Walona.