hehehehe suranyi Aww. They’re real, real good at speaking Dutch. Their grammar is far better than ours.
jgroub, Some history for ya:
Following the French Revolution, Belgium was invaded and annexed by Napoleonic France in 1795. Yet with the defeat of Napoleon’s army at the Battle of Waterloo, fought just a few miles south of Brussels, Belgium was separated from France and made part of the Netherlands by the Congress of Vienna in 1815.
In 1830, Belgium won its independence from the Dutch as a result of an uprising of the Belgian people. A constitutional monarchy was established in 1831, with a monarch invited in from the House of Saxe-Coburg Gotha in Germany.
Language, economic, and political differences between Dutch-speaking Flanders and Francophone Wallonia have produced increased cleavages in Belgian society. The Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and the 19th century accentuated the linguistic North-South division. Francophone Wallonia became an early industrial boom area, affluent and politically dominant. Dutch-speaking Flanders remained agricultural and was economically and politically outdistanced by Brussels and Wallonia. The last 50 years have marked the rapid economic development of Flanders, resulting in a corresponding shift of political power to the Flemish, who now constitute an absolute majority (58%) of the population.
As to the Belgian culture: We have Belgian dopers. I’ll let them answer. They do have damn good beer, though.
Oui, je suis ici. I am Walloon, not Flemish. But as others have said, Dutch and Flemish are virtually the same thing. As with Canadian English and American English, you’ll find slightly different pronunciations, and a few different regionalisms and colloquialisms. Not enough to call Flemish a Dutch dialect, though.
Walloon is definitely a dialect of French (some say even a distinct language in the Gallic family), and is broken down into several sub-dialects by province. But it is dying off as a spoken language, with few people under middle age speaking it. Their French-speaking children can understand Walloon (the dialect, not me ), but don’t speak it.
Now here’s an interesting fact. Scores of elderly folks in northeast Wisconsin’s Belgium-American community (to the east of Green Bay) still speak Walloon, even though their ancestors last immigrated in the 1860s.
It all depends. One of my best friends is half-Bosnian, half-Croat, and decided when he started college that he should really learn his native language properly (that was a long time ago now, and he’s still working on it). He was both amazed and amused to find that the University of Illinois calls the first course “Introductory Serbian or Croatian,” and the difference is basically that you decide at the beginning of the semester in which alphabet you will do your homework. Most of the class was made up of children of immigrants or people who had immigrated to the U.S. as small children, with the occasional Slavic liguist trying to branch out.
His mom (a Dalmatian) still yells at him when he mistakenly throws in a “Serbian” word he learned in class, or even a Croatian word that isn’t of her coastal dialect. But then she also basically thinks that Bosnians are really just Turks who happen to speak a Slavic language. Never a dull moment in that house, let me tell you.
American who lived in Ghent last year pitching in (feebly)-- the biggest difference between Dutch and Flemish is vocabulary (slightly) and accent. Some of the words vary a bit-- at the university there were a few mapson a language department wall with the usage of words meaning “dinner fork,” “butterfly,” and “to ditch class”-- the variations were really pretty severe (the difference between say, Kortrijk near the Belgian-French border and someplace like Groeningen near the Dutch-German border versus places near the Flemish-Dutch/ German linguistic frontier. I learned most of my Dutch in Amsterdam and some terms in East Flanders (where Ghent is) really threw me off for a bit. But it’s really basically the lift/ elevator situation, with odd accents thrown in. I still have to take a minute to realize what language an older person in Bruges is speaking, since their accents are so. . . light and French-y, compared with, say, a Leiden farmer. Dutch TV sounds hysterical to me now. But even people from different regions within the countries think the others sound funny-- East Flemish people listening to West Flemish people, etc.
I’ve heard that because of the cultural bottlenecking after the Hapsburg Spanish smackdown and brain drain to Calvinist areas, that the Flemish dialect kept an older but wider vocabulary and old fashioned/ strictly “correct” grammar (since the Calvinist areas/ United Provinces had more trade contact with, say, England for several centuries and went a little commerce-pidgin). Hence South Africans who speak Afrikaans understand Flemish Dutch speakers more easily than they do Netherlands Dutch-- both were more frozen in time than United Provinces Dutch. Whaddya think?
But overall I think the difference is seen more strongly in the rural areas and among the less well academically educated (like in many places, the universities sort of standardize vocabulary and pronounciation?). I’ve heard Dutch people say the East Flemish accent is sexy in the same way that a Californian would be drawn to a “southern belle” Mississippi accent–sort of perceived as simulataneously backwater and very compelling (there’s a cop show filmed in Ghent right now that is apparently pretty popular in the Netherlands).
Dividing Belgium is a very touchy point. I don’t think it’s very likely that either language group would be annexed by the Netherlands or France, but a division of the country into two based on language (read: “tax district”) is one of the many, many VERY interesting notions of the Vlaams Blo. . . I mean, the, ahem, Vlaams BELANG. But I’ll let real Belgians talk about that since it’s a can of worms. Might be interesting in GD.
(I was at a bike race in Flanders and someone was handing out little yellow and black Flemish flags, which I started merrily waving and was then taken with a fit of frozen worry-- is this simply a Flemish flag, or is this a Flemish flag !? Having no kind of grounding, I was suddenly worried that I looked like a neo-fascist.)
I hung out with a houseload of students from all over Flanders, and this was a running joke. Apparently they speak all slow and musical.
For the record, the way I heard it is that Flemish and Dutch are both dialects of Netherlandish.
There really are strong variations in accents from place to place. When I was trying to learn Flemish living in Leuven, I kept tripping over the “ui” vowel sound. What was this supposed to sound like? Oo-ee? Oy-a? Aihe? Every time I thought I had it, I’d hear somebody say it comepletely differently. Finally I had a girl from Limburg, a girl from West-Vlaanderen, and a guy from Antwerp in the same room. I got three differnt pronunciations of the word for “grapes” (druiven) - plus the “Official Nederlands” version. I declared victory over that vowel sound.
…Until I went to Amsterdam, where Coldfire told me I had it all wrong.
On the languages: in Belgium, if you want to purchase a Vlaamse (Flemish) dictionary, you have to buy a Dutch one. When I lived there thirty years ago, however, I heard many tales of the local dialects being so separate that university kids bringing home their friends had to remind their families to speak “common” Flemish so that the visitor would understand. (I suspect a bit of hyperbole in the stories, but it was a tale frequently told.)
On the history: Belgium was a 19th century invention. As noted above, following the overthrow of Napoleon, Wallony and Flanders were given to the Netherlands to reduce the size (and power) of France. However, the Flemish and the Walloons were both Catholic (the Flemish had lived in the part of the lowlands that the Spanish Hapsburgs were able to control during their sojourn and Protestantism never took hold), and they chafed under many of the rules emanating from Protestant Netherlands. (Religion was not the sole issue, of course, but it made the borders easier to find.) When the Flemings and Walloons broke away from the Netherlands, the greater powers of Europe would not allow Wallony to re-unite with France, so the two groups made common cause and declared themselves a kingdom (to avoid being crushed by any anti-republican monarchies on the continent). They imported a noble from central Europe to be king, and set off to be an independent country. (The Dutch appear to have been relieved to be rid of them.)
Yes, I’d agree. The language quiz being possible is also a case in point of them being one language. There is (or was?) a long running one on Dutch and Flemish television that pitted the Dutch against the Flemish and Gum is quite correct in saying that the Flemish have a much better track record there.
Of course some of the local dialect are extremely hard to understand. I have some folk music from Antwerp and even with the lyrics written down I have only the foggiest notion of what the songs are about. Then again, there are plenty of northern Dutch speakers who can’t understand my Dutch dialect (not the accent but the dialect) as I am from Liiiiiiiiimburg. Whereas Flemish people from just over the border would have less trouble.
Having said that, the two languages are instantly recognisable. Even someone from two minutes over the border will clearly and distinctly be speaking a Dutch dialect or a Flemish one. You’d rarely if ever mistake one for the other if you were a native speaker.
Clarification. From the Dutch part of Limburg. Belgium has the other part of it as per the history explained in previous posts. Limburg is still predominantly Catholic as well, if not very fanatically so. Some northerners think we’re pretty much Belgian anyway.
Being Dutch also, I can only confirm what’s been said here. Same goes for John’s comment on the Scandinavian language (Finnish excluded), as I speak Swedish and understand the other two pretty well (although I have more trouble with Danish than Norwegian, as there are greater differences in pronunciation).
The differences between Dutch and the Dutch spoken by most people living in Flaunders are due to the influence of French, ironically. The Flemish use a lot of directly translated French idioms that we don’t. They often even come up with Dutch translations for things that the Dutch would mostly say in French or French sounding words. This is understandable, when you consider that Wallonia and Flaunders have a similar relationship as Quebec and the rest of Canada.
But officially, we speak the exact same language, have the same dictionaries, and abide the exact same rules, and as has been said, the general perception is that the Flemish are better at Dutch than the Dutch.
While this is quite true, it’s important to remember that:
Flanders, as opposed to Belgium (and Flemish the language, not Belgian the nationality, is the topic of this thread), has a long, long history as an effectively independent County. Much of the rest of Belgium was an integral part of the Duchy of Burgundy when Flanders was united with that realm, again for well over 100 years.
From the time the United Provinces won their independence until the Napoleonic era, an area on the map roughly equivalent to modern Belgium was always present, except for periods of major warfare, as the Spanish and then the Austrian Netherlands. The “Greater Netherlands kingdom” equivalent to the Benelux area was in existence only 15-24 years, depending on whose definition you use (1815-1830 or 1839).
Gum’s right, but it might be of interest to know to Non-Dutch speakers that the Dutch are so used to subtitling with movies and TV, that even Dutch native speakers with slight accents or slight speech impairments (false teeth!) will be subtitled.
It IS a strange phenomenon to Americans, the pride that people speaking a wide variety of Dutch and Flemish accents have of being near-unintelligeble to each other.
Accents and language are nowadays considered a dear heritage, (though ideally to be spoken along side Common Civilized Dutch). That’s the same in America, no doubt. But what is typically Limburgs (and maybe European, I don’t know) are the surprisingly big differences in accent and dialect *over a mere miles. * When it comes to dialects, people moving fifty miles would have trouble understanding each other and their accent would brand them to the locals as “not from here”.
Language over here is, pretty much, a nest scent, and mainly geographically.
I imagine British English has the same distinguishing function, both geographically and between social classes.
Heh! As soon as someone brought up Limburger dialect, I knew it was only a matter of time until you responded!!
A question of curiosity: to what extent is German proper (either “textbook” German or local dialect) common along the Germany-Low Countries borders – are there “Dutch speaking” and “Flemish speaking” Germans, or German-speaking Nederlanders or Belgians?
Aww. They’re real, real good at speaking Dutch. Their grammar is far better than ours.
