Onder en boven de wet. Het Franse West-Vlaams onder de taalwetgeving van 1789 tot 1882

Abstract

The last native speakers of French West Flemish live in the north-west of France, in the department called Nord. At the end of the last century, their number was estimated at around 60.000. Since then, at least one generation has already disappeared. So the current number of speakers will not be much more than a few tens of thousands. That is at most 1% of the department’s population. The rest have adopted French as their mother tongue. In the sixteenth century, the situation was reversed. Probably less than 1% of the people mastered French. The aim of this contribution is to examine the eff ects of French language legislation on the decline of the West Flemish regional language from the French Revolution until Jules Ferry’s laws under the Third Republic