1.
Nord-Pas-de-Calais
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Nord-Pas-de-Calais (French pronunciation, is a former administrative region of France. Since 1 January 2016, it is part of the new region Hauts-de-France and it consisted of the departments of Nord and Pas-de-Calais. Nord-Pas-de-Calais borders the English Channel, the North Sea, Belgium, the majority of the region was once part of the historical Netherlands, but gradually became part of France between 1477 and 1678, particularly during the reign of king Louis XIV. The historical French provinces that preceded Nord-Pas-de-Calais are Artois, French Flanders, French Hainaut and these provincial designations are still frequently used by the inhabitants. Its administrative centre and largest city is Lille, other major towns include Valenciennes, Lens, Douai, Béthune, Dunkirk, Maubeuge, Boulogne, Arras, Cambrai and Saint-Omer. Nord-Pas-de-Calais combines the names of the constituent departments of Nord and Pas-de-Calais, the regional council, however, spells the name Nord-Pas de Calais. The northern part of the region was historically a part of the County of Flanders and those who wish to evidence the historical links the region has with Belgium and the Netherlands prefer to call this region the French Low Countries, which also means French Netherlands in French. Other alternative names are Région Flandre-Artois, Hauts-de-France, and Picardie-du-Nord, see also, History of Nord-Pas-de-Calais Inhabited since prehistoric times, the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region has always been a strategic regions in Europe. French President Charles de Gaulle, who was born in Lille, over the centuries, it was conquered in turn by the Celtic Belgae, the Romans, the Germanic Franks, England, the Spanish and Austrian Netherlands, and the Dutch Republic. After the final French annexation in the early 18th century, much of the region was occupied by Germany during the First. By the 9th century, most inhabitants north of Lille spoke a dialect of Middle Dutch and this linguistic border is still evident today in the place names of the region. Beginning in the 9th century, the border began a steady move to north. By the end of the 13th century, the border had shifted to the river Lys in the south. Boulogne, Artois, and Flanders were fiefs of the French crown, while Hainaut, Calais was an English possession from 1347 to 1558, when it was recovered by the French throne. With the death of the Burgundian duke Charles the Bold in 1477, thus, most of the territories of what is now Nord-Pas-de-Calais were reunited to the Burgundian inheritance, which had passed through Maries marriage to the House of Habsburg. During the Italian Wars much of the conflict between France and Spain occurred in the region and it was also a base for Spanish support of French Catholics in the French Wars of Religion. Beginning with the annexation of Artois in 1659, most of the current Nord department territory had been acquired by the time of the Treaty of Nijmegen in 1678, the current borders were mostly established by the time of the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697. The area, previously divided among the French provinces of Flanders, Artois, under Napoleon, the French boundary was extended to include all of Flanders and present-day Belgium until the Congress of Vienna in 1815 restored the original French boundary
2.
Flanders
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Flanders is the Dutch-speaking northern portion of Belgium, although there are several overlapping definitions, including ones related to culture, language, politics and history. It is one of the communities, regions and language areas of Belgium, the demonym associated with Flanders is Fleming, while the corresponding adjective is Flemish. The official capital of Flanders is Brussels, although Brussels itself has an independent regional government, in historical contexts, Flanders originally refers to the County of Flanders, which around AD1000 stretched from the Strait of Dover to the Scheldt estuary. In accordance with late 20th century Belgian state reforms the area was made two political entities, the Flemish Community and the Flemish Region. These entities were merged, although geographically the Flemish Community, which has a cultural mandate, covers Brussels. Flanders has figured prominently in European history, as a consequence, a very sophisticated culture developed, with impressive achievements in the arts and architecture, rivaling those of northern Italy. Belgium was one of the centres of the 19th century industrial revolution, geographically, Flanders is generally flat, and has a small section of coast on the North Sea. Much of Flanders is agriculturally fertile and densely populated, with a density of almost 500 people per square kilometer. It touches France to the west near the coast, and borders the Netherlands to the north and east, the Brussels Capital Region is an enclave within the Flemish Region. Flanders has exclaves of its own, Voeren in the east is between Wallonia and the Netherlands and Baarle-Hertog in the consists of 22 exclaves surrounded by the Netherlands. It comprises 6.5 million Belgians who consider Dutch to be their mother tongue, the political subdivisions of Belgium, the Flemish Region and the Flemish Community. The first does not comprise Brussels, whereas the latter does comprise the Dutch-speaking inhabitants of Brussels, the political institutions that govern both subdivisions, the operative body Flemish Government and the legislative organ Flemish Parliament. The two westernmost provinces of the Flemish Region, West Flanders and East Flanders, forming the central portion of the historic County of Flanders, a feudal territory that existed from the 8th century until its absorption by the French First Republic. Until the 1600s, this county also extended over parts of France, one of the regions conquered by the French in Flanders, namely French Flanders in the Nord department. French Flanders can be divided into two regions, Walloon Flanders and Maritime Flanders. The first region was predominantly French-speaking already in the 1600s, the latter became so in the 20th century, the city of Lille identifies itself as Flemish, and this is reflected, for instance, in the name of its local railway station TGV Lille Flandres. The region conquered by the Dutch Republic in Flanders, now part of the Dutch province of Zeeland, the significance of the County of Flanders and its counts eroded through time, but the designation remained in a very broad sense. In the Early modern period, the term Flanders was associated with the part of the Low Countries
3.
Belgium
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Belgium, officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a sovereign state in Western Europe bordered by France, the Netherlands, Germany, Luxembourg, and the North Sea. It is a small, densely populated country which covers an area of 30,528 square kilometres and has a population of about 11 million people. Additionally, there is a group of German-speakers who live in the East Cantons located around the High Fens area. Historically, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg were known as the Low Countries, the region was called Belgica in Latin, after the Roman province of Gallia Belgica. From the end of the Middle Ages until the 17th century, today, Belgium is a federal constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary system of governance. It is divided into three regions and three communities, that exist next to each other and its two largest regions are the Dutch-speaking region of Flanders in the north and the French-speaking southern region of Wallonia. The Brussels-Capital Region is a bilingual enclave within the Flemish Region. A German-speaking Community exists in eastern Wallonia, Belgiums linguistic diversity and related political conflicts are reflected in its political history and complex system of governance, made up of six different governments. Upon its independence, declared in 1830, Belgium participated in the Industrial Revolution and, during the course of the 20th century, possessed a number of colonies in Africa. This continuing antagonism has led to several far-reaching reforms, resulting in a transition from a unitary to a federal arrangement during the period from 1970 to 1993. Belgium is also a member of the Eurozone, NATO, OECD and WTO. Its capital, Brussels, hosts several of the EUs official seats as well as the headquarters of major international organizations such as NATO. Belgium is also a part of the Schengen Area, Belgium is a developed country, with an advanced high-income economy and is categorized as very high in the Human Development Index. A gradual immigration by Germanic Frankish tribes during the 5th century brought the area under the rule of the Merovingian kings, a gradual shift of power during the 8th century led the kingdom of the Franks to evolve into the Carolingian Empire. Many of these fiefdoms were united in the Burgundian Netherlands of the 14th and 15th centuries, the Eighty Years War divided the Low Countries into the northern United Provinces and the Southern Netherlands. The latter were ruled successively by the Spanish and the Austrian Habsburgs and this was the theatre of most Franco-Spanish and Franco-Austrian wars during the 17th and 18th centuries. The reunification of the Low Countries as the United Kingdom of the Netherlands occurred at the dissolution of the First French Empire in 1815, although the franchise was initially restricted, universal suffrage for men was introduced after the general strike of 1893 and for women in 1949. The main political parties of the 19th century were the Catholic Party, French was originally the single official language adopted by the nobility and the bourgeoisie
4.
Language family
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A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestral language or parental language, called the proto-language of that family. Linguists therefore describe the languages within a language family as being genetically related. Estimates of the number of living languages vary from 5,000 to 8,000, depending on the precision of ones definition of language, the 2013 edition of Ethnologue catalogs just over 7,000 living human languages. A living language is one that is used as the primary form of communication of a group of people. There are also dead and extinct languages, as well as some that are still insufficiently studied to be classified. Membership of languages in a family is established by comparative linguistics. Sister languages are said to have a genetic or genealogical relationship, speakers of a language family belong to a common speech community. The divergence of a proto-language into daughter languages typically occurs through geographical separation, individuals belonging to other speech communities may also adopt languages from a different language family through the language shift process. Genealogically related languages present shared retentions, that is, features of the proto-language that cannot be explained by chance or borrowing, for example, Germanic languages are Germanic in that they share vocabulary and grammatical features that are not believed to have been present in the Proto-Indo-European language. These features are believed to be innovations that took place in Proto-Germanic, language families can be divided into smaller phylogenetic units, conventionally referred to as branches of the family because the history of a language family is often represented as a tree diagram. A family is a unit, all its members derive from a common ancestor. Some taxonomists restrict the term family to a level. Those who affix such labels also subdivide branches into groups, a top-level family is often called a phylum or stock. The closer the branches are to other, the closer the languages will be related. For example, the Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Romance, there is a remarkably similar pattern shown by the linguistic tree and the genetic tree of human ancestry that was verified statistically. Languages interpreted in terms of the phylogenetic tree of human languages are transmitted to a great extent vertically as opposed to horizontally. A speech variety may also be considered either a language or a dialect depending on social or political considerations, thus, different sources give sometimes wildly different accounts of the number of languages within a family. Classifications of the Japonic family, for example, range from one language to nearly twenty, most of the worlds languages are known to be related to others
5.
Indo-European languages
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The Indo-European languages are a language family of several hundred related languages and dialects. There are about 445 living Indo-European languages, according to the estimate by Ethnologue, the most widely spoken Indo-European languages by native speakers are Spanish, English, Hindustani, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, and Punjabi, each with over 100 million speakers. Today, 46% of the population speaks an Indo-European language as a first language. The Indo-European family includes most of the languages of Europe, and parts of Western, Central. It was also predominant in ancient Anatolia, the ancient Tarim Basin and most of Central Asia until the medieval Turkic migrations, all Indo-European languages are descendants of a single prehistoric language, reconstructed as Proto-Indo-European, spoken sometime in the Neolithic era. Several disputed proposals link Indo-European to other language families. In the 16th century, European visitors to the Indian subcontinent began to notice similarities among Indo-Aryan, Iranian, in 1583, English Jesuit missionary Thomas Stephens in Goa wrote a letter to his brother in which he noted similarities between Indian languages and Greek and Latin. Another account to mention the ancient language Sanskrit came from Filippo Sassetti, a merchant born in Florence in 1540, writing in 1585, he noted some word similarities between Sanskrit and Italian. However, neither Stephens nor Sassettis observations led to further scholarly inquiry and he included in his hypothesis Dutch, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Persian, and German, later adding Slavic, Celtic, and Baltic languages. However, Van Boxhorns suggestions did not become known and did not stimulate further research. Ottoman Turkish traveler Evliya Çelebi visited Vienna in 1665–1666 as part of a diplomatic mission, gaston Coeurdoux and others made observations of the same type. Coeurdoux made a comparison of Sanskrit, Latin and Greek conjugations in the late 1760s to suggest a relationship among them. Thomas Young first used the term Indo-European in 1813, deriving from the extremes of the language family. A synonym is Indo-Germanic, specifying the familys southeasternmost and northwesternmost branches, a number of other synonymous terms have also been used. Franz Bopps Comparative Grammar appeared between 1833 and 1852 and marks the beginning of Indo-European studies as an academic discipline, the classical phase of Indo-European comparative linguistics leads from this work to August Schleichers 1861 Compendium and up to Karl Brugmanns Grundriss, published in the 1880s. Brugmanns neogrammarian reevaluation of the field and Ferdinand de Saussures development of the theory may be considered the beginning of modern Indo-European studies. This led to the laryngeal theory, a major step forward in Indo-European linguistics. Isolated terms in Luwian/Hittite mentioned in Semitic Old Assyrian texts from the 20th and 19th centuries BC, Hittite texts from about 1650 BC, Armenian, writing known from the beginning of the 5th century AD
6.
Germanic languages
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It is the third most spoken Indo-European subdivision, behind Italic and Indo-Iranian, and ahead of Balto-Slavic languages. Limburgish varieties have roughly 1.3 million speakers along the Dutch–Belgian–German border, the main North Germanic languages are Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, and Faroese, which have a combined total of about 20 million speakers. The East Germanic branch included Gothic, Burgundian, and Vandalic, the last to die off was Crimean Gothic, spoken in the late 18th century in some isolated areas of Crimea. The total number of Germanic languages throughout history is unknown, as some of them—especially East Germanic languages—disappeared during or after the Migration Period. Proto-Germanic, along all of its descendants, is characterized by a number of unique linguistic features. Early varieties of Germanic enter history with the Germanic tribes moving south from Scandinavia in the 2nd century BC, to settle in the area of todays northern Germany, furthermore, it is the de facto language of the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. It is also a language in Nicaragua and Malaysia. German is a language of Austria, Belgium, Germany, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg and Switzerland and has regional status in Italy, Poland, Namibia. German also continues to be spoken as a minority language by immigrant communities in North America, South America, Central America, Mexico, a German dialect, Pennsylvania Dutch, is still present amongst Anabaptist populations in Pennsylvania in the United States. Dutch is a language of Aruba, Belgium, Curaçao. The Netherlands also colonised Indonesia, but Dutch was scrapped as a language after Indonesian independence. Dutch was until 1925 an official language in South Africa, but evolved in and was replaced by Afrikaans, Afrikaans is one of the 11 official languages in South Africa and is a lingua franca of Namibia. It is used in other Southern African nations as well, low German is a collection of sometimes very diverse dialects spoken in the northeast of the Netherlands and northern Germany. Scots is spoken in Lowland Scotland and parts of Ulster, frisian is spoken among half a million people who live on the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark. Luxembourgish is mainly spoken in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, though it extends into small parts of Belgium, France. Limburgish varieties are spoken in the Limburg and Rhineland regions, along the Dutch–Belgian–German border, Swedish is also one of the two official languages in Finland, along with Finnish, and the only official language in the Åland Islands. Danish is also spoken natively by the Danish minority in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, Norwegian is the official language of Norway. Icelandic is the language of Iceland, and is spoken by a significant minority in the Faroe Islands
7.
West Germanic languages
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The West Germanic languages constitute the largest of the three branches of the Germanic family of languages. The three most prevalent West Germanic languages are English, German, and Dutch, additionally, several creoles, patois, and pidgins are based on Dutch and English as they were languages of colonial empires. The West Germanic languages share many lexemes not existing in North Germanic and/or East Germanic—archaisms as well as common neologisms, most scholars doubt that there was a Proto-West-Germanic proto-language common to the West Germanic languages and no others, though a few maintain that Proto-West-Germanic existed. Although there is quite a bit of knowledge about North Sea Germanic or Anglo-Frisian, linguists know almost nothing about Weser-Rhine Germanic, in fact, these two terms were coined in the 1940s to refer to groups of archeological findings rather than linguistic features. Only later were these terms applied to hypothetical dialectal differences within both regions, the rhotacism of /z/ to /r/. The development of the demonstrative pronoun ancestral to English this, rhotacism, for example, was largely complete in West Germanic at a time when North Germanic runic inscriptions still clearly distinguished the two phonemes. However, there are also a number of common archaisms in West Germanic shared by neither Old Norse nor Gothic, the debate on the existence of a Proto-West-Germanic clade was recently summarized, That North Germanic is. A unitary subgroup is completely obvious, as all of its dialects shared a series of innovations. Several scholars have published reconstructions of Proto-West-Germanic morphological paradigms and many authors have reconstructed individual Proto-West-Germanic morphological forms or lexemes, the first comprehensive reconstruction of the Proto-West-Germanic language was published in 2013 by Wolfram Euler. If indeed Proto-West-Germanic existed, it must have been between the 3rd and 7th centuries, after that, the split into West and North Germanic occurred. It has been argued that, judging by their nearly identical syntax, over the course of this period, the dialects diverged successively. Bordering dialects very probably continued to be mutually intelligible even beyond the boundaries of the consonant shift, in fact, many dialects of Limburgish and Ripuarian are still mutually intelligible today. The High German consonant shift distinguished the High German languages from the other West Germanic languages, by early modern times, the span had extended into considerable differences, ranging from Highest Alemannic in the South to Northern Low Saxon in the North. Although both extremes are considered German, they are not mutually intelligible, the southernmost varieties have completed the second sound shift, whereas the northern dialects remained unaffected by the consonant shift. Of modern German varieties, Low German is the one that most resembles modern English, the district of Angeln, from which the name English derives, is in the extreme northern part of Germany between the Danish border and the Baltic coast. The area of the Saxons lay south of Anglia, the Anglo-Saxons, two Germanic tribes, were a combination of a number of peoples from northern Germany and the Jutland Peninsula. Note that divisions between subfamilies of Germanic are rarely defined, most form dialect continua, with adjacent dialects being mutually intelligible. Also note that English is part of the North Sea Germanic branch of the West Germanic languages, some may only appear in the older languages but are no longer apparent in the modern languages
8.
Franconian languages
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Franconian includes a number of West Germanic languages and dialects possibly derived from the languages and dialects originally spoken by the Franks from their ethnogenesis in the 3rd century AD. Linguists have different views about whether these languages and dialects have descended from a single Franconian proto-language, Low Franconian, also called Low Frankish, consists of Dutch, Afrikaans, Limburgish, and their dialects, some of which are sometimes seen as regional languages. Sometimes, Low Franconian is grouped together with Low German rather confusingly as Low German, a transitional zone between Low Franconian and Central Franconian is formed by the so-called Meuse-Rhenish dialects located in southern Dutch Limburg and in the German Lower Rhine. S. An estimated 2,500,000 people speak these dialects and this area follows the course of the Benrath and Speyer lines, a zone along which the two changes occurred along with other diagnostic changes. From a linguistics point of view the Rhineland is a zone where the Rhenish Fan is located. Not all Dutch dialects are contained in the Rhineland, moreover, historical Franconian, Dutch is spoken between the Rhineland and the North Sea. In all, in definition, the Franconian language area consists of the Low Countries, parts of France. In addition to these dialects, Franconian includes two overseas dialects, Afrikaans spoken in South Africa and the Pennsylvania German language spoken in North America. The difference between a dialect and a language is often debatable, in general, a dialect is contained within a language, and is not identical to it, unless the language has only that dialect. The Franconian languages are considered dialects of German and Dutch even though often termed languages, the dialects are further subdivided into ranges under a common name, which may also be subdivided, for example, Flemish is a dialect of Dutch. It is further divided into East and West Flemish, not all dialects of Dutch and German are Franconian. For example, in the case of German, excluded from the category Franconian are the high, or Alpine, dialects of Swabia, Bavaria, Austria and Switzerland, the word Franconian refers to a collection of dialects, and not to a language. For example, German and Dutch, which are related, descend from Proto-Germanic. Dialects of German and Dutch at any stage of their development are not necessarily related to each other, the defining elements of the dialect might come from any language or be innovated. No dialect labelled Franconian has to be related to any other dialect of the same tag, for example, Old Low Franconian, ancestral phase of Dutch, is not related to the Franconian dialects of Old High German. Moreover, Middle Franconian is not related to Middle High German, Continental Europeans use the equivalent of Frankish, from the original Latin Franci, with the same meaning, for example, the German for Old Franconian is alt-Fränkisch. The Dutch linguist, Jan van Vliet, uses Francica or Francks to mean the language of the oude Francken, according to van Vliet, Francks descended from oud Teuts, what is today referred to in English as the Proto-Germanic language. The name Franconian, an English adjective made into a noun, the Ripuarian Franks at that time were not acting as such, but were simply part of the Frankish empire under the Carolingian dynasty
9.
West Flemish
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West Flemish is a dialect of the Dutch language spoken in western Belgium and adjoining parts of the Netherlands and France. Some of the cities where West Flemish is widely spoken are Bruges, Kortrijk, Ostend, Roeselare. The dialects of the rest of the Dutch province of Zeeland, Zeelandic, are included in West Flemish. West Flemish is listed as a language in UNESCOs online Red Book of Endangered Languages. West Flemish phonology differs a lot from the standard Dutch phonology, the best known are the velar fricatives g and ch in Dutch, being realised as glottal h -, and the overall lack of diphthongs compared to Dutch. The following differences are listed by their Dutch spelling, as different letters have evolved to the same sound in Dutch. Pronunciations can also differ a bit from region to region, sch - /sx/ is realised as, or. Ei - /ɛi/ is realised as or, ij - /ɛi/ is realised as. Au - /ʌu/ is realised as ou - /ʌu/ is realised as, it resembles a lot the long oe that is used in Dutch. Ie - /i/ is more stressed towards aa - /aː/ is realised as, due to the non-existent /x/ and /ɣ/ sounds in West Flemish, native speakers of the dialect have to concentrate a lot to pronounce these sounds. This often results in hyper-correction of the /h/ sounds to a /x/ or /ɣ/, the Dutch language also has many words with an -en suffix. While standard Dutch and most Dutch dialects dont pronounce the final n, West Flemish typically drops the e, for base words already ending with n, the final n sound is often prolonged to make the suffix clear. This mute-e is similar to many English words, beaten, listen, the short o in words can also be pronounced as a short u. This happens spontaneously on some words, but other words keep their original short o sounds, similarly, the short a can turn into a short o in some words without apparent reason. The diftong ui doesnt exist in West Flemish, and is pronounced as a u or a long ie. Similar to the ui, the o can turn into an on some words. This transition often shows similarities with English and this phenomenon is shared with the Lower Saxon Germanic dialects, and even more prominent in English. Under influence of Standard Dutch, the number of people that uses the -s suffix for the form on these words diverging from Dutch is diminishing
10.
Dutch language
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It is the third most widely spoken Germanic language, after English and German. Dutch is one of the closest relatives of both German and English and is said to be roughly in between them, Dutch vocabulary is mostly Germanic and incorporates more Romance loans than German but far fewer than English. In both Belgium and the Netherlands, the official name for Dutch is Nederlands, and its dialects have their own names, e. g. Hollands, West-Vlaams. The use of the word Vlaams to describe Standard Dutch for the variations prevalent in Flanders and used there, however, is common in the Netherlands, the Dutch language has been known under a variety of names. It derived from the Old Germanic word theudisk, one of the first names used for the non-Romance languages of Western Europe. It literarily means the language of the people, that is. The term was used as opposed to Latin, the language of writing. In the first text in which it is found, dating from 784, later, theudisca appeared also in the Oaths of Strasbourg to refer to the Germanic portion of the oath. This led inevitably to confusion since similar terms referred to different languages, owing to Dutch commercial and colonial rivalry in the 16th and 17th centuries, the English term came to refer exclusively to the Dutch. A notable exception is Pennsylvania Dutch, which is a West Central German variety called Deitsch by its speakers, Jersey Dutch, on the other hand, as spoken until the 1950s in New Jersey, is a Dutch-based creole. In Dutch itself, Diets went out of common use - although Platdiets is still used for the transitional Limburgish-Ripuarian Low Dietsch dialects in northeast Belgium, Nederlands, the official Dutch word for Dutch, did not become firmly established until the 19th century. This designation had been in use as far back as the end of the 15th century, one of them was it reflected a distinction with Hoogduits, High Dutch, meaning the language spoken in Germany. The Hoog was later dropped, and thus, Duits narrowed down in meaning to refer to the German language. g, in English, too, Netherlandic is regarded as a more accurate term for the Dutch language, but is hardly ever used. Old Dutch branched off more or less around the same time Old English, Old High German, Old Frisian and Old Saxon did. During that period, it forced Old Frisian back from the western coast to the north of the Low Countries, on the other hand, Dutch has been replaced in adjacent lands in nowadays France and Germany. The division in Old, Middle and Modern Dutch is mostly conventional, one of the few moments linguists can detect somewhat of a revolution is when the Dutch standard language emerged and quickly established itself. This is assumed to have taken place in approximately the mid-first millennium BCE in the pre-Roman Northern European Iron Age, the Germanic languages are traditionally divided into three groups, East, West, and North Germanic. They remained mutually intelligible throughout the Migration Period, Dutch is part of the West Germanic group, which also includes English, Scots, Frisian, Low German and High German
