How does walloon sound to you?

[Schipperman]

How does walloon sound to you?

I've taken songs from the malmedian dialect, which I see as the purest since it's the last area where it's still, though sparsely, spoken on a daily basis, so has a lot of native speakers among elders, and especially beacause it wasn't influenced much by recent french lexical inputs since the territory was under under German authority till 1919.

[Ouistreham]

It's difficult to judge from songs, because melodies impose accents and stressings that don't inherently belong to the language in question (actually any language sounds good when sung).

But those songs sound really like genuine Walloon — the one that is sometimes (rarely) spoken West of Liège is mixed with Picard, and is increasingly undergoing heavy overtones from Brussels speech anyway.

Here we hear a language that sounds both more "Germanic" and more "Latin" than standard French. It even contains some "Celtic" features that remind of Auvergne, Brittany, Savoy (or Quebec too).

In short, all components of French are there, but without the properly "Francian" synthesis (which is the reason why Walloon is often described as being a remnant of Mediaeval French).

Besides, I understand scarcely more that half of what is said in those songs...


Pour mieux me faire comprendre, traduction dans mon dialecte natif :

Difficile de juger sur des chansons, car les mélodies imposent des prosodies qui n'appartiennent pas forcément à la langue en question (toute langue chantée sonne bien, en fait).

Mais ces chansons sonnent comme du vrai wallon — celui parlé parfois (rarement) à l'Ouest de Liège est mélangé de picard, et de toutes façons subit de plus en plus de fortes influences bruxelloises.

Là on entend une langue qui sonne à la fois plus "germanique" et plus "latine" que le français standard. Elle a même des traits "celtiques" qui évoquent l'Auvergne, la Bretagne, la Savoie (ou le Québec).

Bref, toutes les composantes du français sont là, mais sans la synthèse proprement "francienne". Raison pour laquelle le wallon est souvent présenté comme une survivance du français mediéval.

À part ça, je comprends à peine plus de la moitié de ce qui est dit dans ces chansons...