Walloons are a Gallo-Romance ethnic group native to Wallonia and the immediate adjacent regions of Flanders, France, Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Walloons primarily speak langues d'oïl such as Belgian French, Picard and Walloon. Walloons are primarily Roman Catholic, with a historical minority of Protestantism which dates back to the Reformation era.
Walloon Brabant is a province located in Belgium's French-speaking region of Wallonia. It borders on the province of Flemish Brabant and the provinces of Liège, Namur and Hainaut. Walloon Brabant's capital and largest city is Wavre.
Alsatian is the group of Alemannic German dialects spoken in most of Alsace, a formerly disputed region in eastern France that has passed between French and German control five times since 1681.
Wallonia, officially the Walloon Region, is one of the three regions of Belgium—along with Flanders and Brussels. Covering the southern portion of the country, Wallonia is primarily French-speaking. It accounts for 55% of Belgium's territory, but only a third of its population. The Walloon Region and the French Community of Belgium, which is the political entity responsible for matters related mainly to culture and education, are independent concepts, because the French Community of Belgium encompasses both Wallonia and the bilingual Brussels-Capital Region but not the German-speaking Community of Belgium.
Provençal is a variety of Occitan, spoken by people in Provence and parts of Drôme and Gard. The term Provençal used to refer to the entire Occitan language, but more recently it has referred only to the variety of Occitan spoken in Provence. However, it can still be found being used to refer to Occitan as a whole, e.g. Merriam-Webster states that it can be used to refer to general Occitan, though this is going out of use.
Walloon is a Romance language that is spoken in much of Wallonia and, to a very small extent, in Brussels, Belgium; some villages near Givet, northern France; and a clutch of communities in northeastern Wisconsin, United States.
Old French was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France approximately between the late 8th and the mid-14th century. Rather than a unified language, Old French was a group of Romance dialects, mutually intelligible yet diverse. These dialects came to be collectively known as the langues d'oïl, contrasting with the langues d'oc, the emerging Occitano-Romance languages of Occitania, now the south of France.
Franco-Provençal is a language within the Gallo-Romance family, originally spoken in east-central France, western Switzerland and northwestern Italy.
Picard is a langue d'oïl of the Romance language family spoken in the northernmost of France and parts of Hainaut province in Belgium. Administratively, this area is divided between the French Hauts-de-France region and the Belgian Wallonia along the border between both countries due to its traditional core being the districts of Tournai and Mons.
The langues d'oïl are a dialect continuum that includes standard French and its closest autochthonous relatives historically spoken in the northern half of France, southern Belgium, and the Channel Islands. They belong to the larger category of Gallo-Romance languages, which also include the historical languages of east-central France and western Switzerland, southern France, portions of northern Italy, the Val d'Aran in Spain, and under certain acceptations those of Catalonia.
"The Song of the Walloons" is the regional anthem of Wallonia in Belgium. The original lyrics were written by Théophile Bovy in 1900 in the Walloon language. A year later, it was set to music composed by Louis Hillier. Performed for the first time in the city of Liège, the song quickly spread to other parts of French-speaking Belgium and established itself like a "national" anthem for Wallonia.
Gallo is a regional language of eastern Brittany. It is one of the langues d'oïl, a Romance sub-family that includes French. Today it is spoken only by a minority of the population, as the standard form of French now predominates in this area.
Niçard, nissart/Niçart, niçois, or nizzardo is the dialect that was historically spoken in the city of Nice, in France, and in a few surrounding communes. Niçard is generally considered a subdialect of Provençal, itself a dialect of Occitan. Some Italian irredentists have claimed it as a Ligurian dialect.
Because modern Belgium is a multilingual country, Belgian literature is often treated as a branch of French literature or Dutch literature. Some writing also exists in the regional languages of Belgium, with published works in both the Walloon language, closely related to French, and also in various regional Flemish or Dutch-related dialects.
Louis Remacle was a linguistics professor at the University of Liège who contributed in particular to the recognition and study of the Walloon language. He also published a number of innovative collections of poetry in his local dialect.
Jean Gol was a Belgian politician for the liberal Walloon party Parti Réformateur Libéral (PRL). He was a minister, on several occasions, in the Belgian government, including service as Deputy Prime Minister.
The Walloon Movement is an umbrella term for all Belgium political movements that either assert the existence of a Walloon identity and of Wallonia and/or defend French culture and language within Belgium, either within the framework of the 1830 Deal or either defending the linguistic rights of French-speakers. The movement began as a defence of the primacy of French but later gained political and socio-economic objectives. In French, the terms wallingantisme and wallingants are also used to describe, sometimes pejoratively, the movement and its activists. To a lesser extent, the Walloon Movement is also associated with the representation of the small German-speaking population in the East Belgium of the Walloon Region.
The Walloon Movement traces its ancestry to 1856 when literary and folkloric movements based around the Society of Walloon language and literature began forming. Despite the formation of the Society of Walloon Literature, it was not until around 1880 that a "Walloon and French-speaking defense movement" appeared, following the linguistic laws of the 1870s. The movement asserted the existence of Wallonia and a Walloon identity while maintaining the defense of the French language.
In dialectology, Romance Belgium, also called Wallonia, is the part of Belgium where people traditionally speak one of the regional romance languages, all from the Langues d'oïl group. Romance Belgium includes almost all of Dialectal Wallonia where Walloon and French are spoken, a picardic zone corresponding to the major part of the Province of Hainaut, the Pays gaumais with the Lorrain language and a Champenois zone.
The Manifesto for Walloon Culture was a document published on September 15, 1983, in Liège, Belgium. Signed by 75 prominent figures from the artistic, journalistic, and academic communities of Wallonia, the manifesto aimed to promote Walloon culture and identity.
