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French Flemish (Fransch vlaemsch, Standard Dutch: Frans-Vlaams, French: flamand français) is a West Flemish dialect spoken in the north of contemporary France.. Place names attest to Flemish having been spoken since the 8th century in the part of Flanders that was ceded to France at the 1659 Treaty of the Pyrenees, and which hence became known as French Flanders.
The term Flemish itself has become ambiguous. Nowadays, it is used in at least five ways, depending on the context. These include: An indication of Dutch written and spoken in Flanders including the Dutch standard language as well as the non-standardized dialects, including intermediate forms between vernacular dialects and the standard.
French Flanders (French: Flandre française [flɑ̃dʁ(ə) fʁɑ̃sɛːz]; Dutch: Frans-Vlaanderen; West Flemish: Frans-Vloandern) is a part of the historical County of Flanders, where Flemish—a Low Franconian dialect cluster of Dutch—was (and to some extent, still is) traditionally spoken.
The urban dialects of the Randstad, which are Hollandic dialects, do not diverge from standard Dutch very much, but there is a clear difference between the city dialects of Rotterdam, The Hague, Amsterdam and Utrecht. In some rural Hollandic areas, more authentic Hollandic dialects are still being used, especially north of Amsterdam.
The traditional language of French Westhoek is a Dutch dialect called West Flemish, the French subdialect of which is known as French Flemish.It was once the dominant language of the region, but a long-time policy of Francization, starting with the introduction of French as the language of education in 1853, has led to the replacement of Dutch with French in the region.
The main reason for Brussels being mainly French-speaking was the low social prestige of the Dutch language in Belgium during the 19th century and the severe discrimination against both Dutch as a language and the Flemings. [38] French was, at that time, the language of the administration, government, culture, law and education.
The second-most spoken primary (Belgian) language, used natively by approximately one third of the population, is French. [3] It is the official language of the French Community (which, like the Flemish Community, is a political entity), the dominant language in Wallonia (having also a small German-speaking Community), as well as the Brussels ...
Its various dialects contain a number of lexical and a few grammatical features which distinguish them from the standard language. [13] As in the Netherlands, the pronunciation of Standard Dutch is affected by the native dialect of the speaker. At the same time East Flemish forms a continuum with both Brabantic and West Flemish.