History of the term Wallon

The history of the term Wallon and its derivatives begins with the ancient Germanic word walh, which generally referred to Celtic- or Romance-speaking populations with whom the Germanic peoples had contact. But the original form of its etymon and its precise origin in the French language has not been definitively established. It may have originated from Medieval Latin after being borrowed from Old Franconian. Another possibility is that it derives, through a change in suffix, from wallec, meaning "the langue d'oïl spoken in the Low Countries." The term wallon, as we know it today, first appeared in the 15th century in the Memoirs of the medieval chronicler Jean de Haynin. Over time, the semantic scope of Wallon and its derivatives, such as the toponym Wallonie, has gradually narrowed, becoming an endonym and continuing to diminish even today. This lexicological history has been primarily studied within intellectual circles of the Walloon Movement. The principal work on this subject is Histoire des mots Wallon et Wallonie by Albert Henry, which, according to Jean-Pol Demacq, reflects the Walloons' desire to "find answers to their questions, tracing the winding and very contemporary path of the search for [their] Walloon identity."

History of the Term Wallon

Germanic Origins and Latin Borrowing

The earliest mentions resembling the French word Wallon that have come down to us are in Latin, clearly indicating its Germanic origin:

Igitur primus Adelardus nativam linguam non-habuit Theutonicam, sed quam corrupte nominant Romanam, Theutonice Walonicam (As for the first Adelard, his native language was not Germanic, but the one which, through an erroneous term, is called Romana, while in Germanic it is called Walonica). 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. The adjective Walonicus or its Central French variant Gualonicus means "in Romance" and is used in opposition to the adjective Teutonicus, which means "in Germanic." This distinction is linguistic, not ethnic, as J.R.R. Tolkien asserts in his essay English and Welsh (English and Welsh). It refers to the entire Romance-speaking population of Gaul, but its lexical scope quickly narrows to designate only the speakers of a langue d'oïl, that is, the inhabitants of Neustria. This is evident in another Latin text where its usage suggests that it was likely integrated into the Latin vocabulary of the time, which pertains to the bishopric of Tournai and concerns the granting of scholarships for theological studies at the Sorbonne. 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.

Early appearances in Romance languages It was not until the late 13th century that words related to Wallon appeared in the langue d'oïl. One such term, walois, is found in the Tournament of Chauvency (1285), a long poem by Jacques Bretel, who describes a herald of Alsatian origin:

Lors commenca à fastroillier / Et le bon fransoiz essilier, / Et d'un walois tout despannei / M'a dit "Bien soiez vos venei, / Sire Jaquenet, volentiers" (Then he began to babble and butcher the good French language, and in a completely mangled walois, he said to me: 'You are welcome, Sir Jaquenet, gladly').

In some manuscripts, Et d'un walois tout despannei is replaced by en un roman tout despannei ("in a completely mangled Romance"). Here, walois refers to the Romance language spoken in a region close to those where Germanic languages were spoken—that is, a langue d'oïl. Another variant, walesch(e), the feminine form of walois, appears in other texts, such as the Poésies of Gilles Li Muisis: "Car je piers men walesch" (For I lose my walesch). Here, too, walesch refers to a langue d'oïl, although in Tournai, the term Romans was also used for the same language. The suffix -esche (from the Latinized Germanic -isca) was commonly used in langue d'oïl to form feminine adjectives of nationality, along with its Norman-Picard variants -eske and -esque, as in tiesche langue ("German language"), danesche langue ("Danish language"), and la gente englesche ("the English people"). Thus, walois is merely a variant of gaulois (Gallic), as northern langue d'oïl dialects (Norman, Picard, Walloon, Champenois, Burgundian, and Low Lorraine) retained the initial w- sound, later sometimes evolving into v. In contrast, further south it evolved into [gʷ] and then g in standard French. 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. Wallec is a Picard form where the original s in wallesc had already become silent. In 1477 the term Pays walecques appears in the Doléances presented to Mary of Burgundy and in the Great Privilege, her response to those grievances. The Belgian linguist Maurits Gysseling suggests that walesch likely existed in Dutch by the 11th century, although the earliest manuscripts showing its equivalent, walsch, date only from the 13th century. Before the 14th century the verb walesquier ("to speak an incomprehensible language") also appears, notably in the Roman de Cassidorus by an author believed to be Baudoin Butor. Butor, who lived in the northern Picard-speaking region, implies, according to Albert Henry, the prior existence of wallesc and its use among Picard speakers. Albert Henry concludes that, if the word wallon did exist at the time, which is uncertain, there were competing terms from other linguistic domains near Germanic regions, terms that seem to have been used only in limited areas. He also confirms that these terms do not denote an ethnic identity but rather a linguistic reality.

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