Brusselian dialect

Brusselian (also known as , , , or ) is a Dutch dialect native to Brussels, Belgium. It is essentially a heavily-Francisized Brabantian Dutch dialectTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn that incorporates a sprinkle of Spanish loanwords dating back to the rule of the Low Countries by the Habsburgs (1519–1713).Template:Sfn

Brusselian was widely spoken in the Marolles/Marollen neighbourhood of the City of Brussels until the 20th century.Template:Sfn It still survives among a small minority of inhabitants called BrusseleersTemplate:Sfn (or Brusseleirs), many of them quite bi- and multilingual in French and Dutch.

The Royal Theatre Toone, a folkloric theatre of marionettes in central Brussels, still puts on puppet plays in Brusselian.Template:Sfn

Toponymy

The toponyms in Dutch or in French refer to the Marolles/Marollen, a neighbourhood of the City of Brussels, near the Palace of Justice, which itself takes its name from the former abbey of the Apostoline sisters, a religious group based in this area during the Middle Ages (from in Latin ("those who honour the Virgin Mary"), later contracted to /, and finally /). Historically a working class neighbourhood, it has subsequently become a fashionable part of the city.Template:Sfn

Brusselian is described as "totally indecipherable to the foreigner (which covers everyone not born in the Marolles), which is probably a good thing as it is richly abusive."Template:Sfn

What is Brusselian?

File:1939 les Marolles derrière le Palais de Justice dessin par Léon van Dievoet 13 juillet 1939.JPG

Sketch of the Marolles/Marollen in 1939 by Léon van Dievoet

There is a dispute and confusion about the meaning of Brusselian, which many consider to be a neighbourhood jargon distinct from a larger Brussels Dutch dialect, while others use the term "Marols" as an overarching substitute term for that citywide dialect. According to Jeanine Treffers-Daller, “the dialect has a tremendous prestige and a lot of myths are doing the rounds.”

The Brusselian word zwanze is commonly applied by speakers of French and Dutch to denote a sarcastic form of folk humour considered typical of Brussels.Template:Sfn

Origins

A local version of the Brabantian dialect was originally spoken in Brussels. When the Kingdom of Belgium gained its independence in 1830 after the Belgian Revolution, French was established as the kingdom's only official language. It was therefore primarily used amongst the nobility (though some in the historic towns of Flanders were bilingual and stayed attached to the old Flemish literature), the middle class and a significant portion of the population whose secondary education had only been delivered in French.

French then gradually spread through the working classes, especially after the establishment of compulsory education in Belgium from 1914 for children aged between six and fourteen years. Primary school education was given in Dutch in the Flemish Region and in French in the Walloon Region. Secondary education was only given in French throughout Belgium. Drained by the personal needs of the administration, many new working class arrivals from the south of Belgium, again increased the presence of French in Brussels. Informal language was from then on a mixture of Romance and Germanic influences, which adapted into becoming Brusselian.

Nowadays, the Brussels-Capital Region is officially bilingual in French and Dutch, even though French has become the predominant language of the city.

Examples

An example of Brusselian is:

In The Adventures of Tintin

File:Coat of Arms of Syldavia.png

The coat-of-arms of Syldavia features a motto in Syldavian, which is based on Brusselian and reads , in English: ("Here I am, here I stay").

For the popular comic series The Adventures of Tintin, the Brussels author Hergé modelled his fictional languages Syldavian and Bordurian on Brusselian, and modelled many other personal and place-names in his works on the dialect (e.g. the city of in the fictional Middle Eastern country of Khemed comes from the Brusselian phrase for "I'm cold"). Bordurian, for example, has as one of its words the Brusselian-based meaning "mister" (cf. Dutch ). In the original French, the fictional Arumbaya language of San Theodoros is another incarnation of Brusselian.