Misplaced Pages

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

Brusselian was widely spoken in the Marolles/Marollen neighbourhood of the City of Brussels until the 20th century. It still survives among a small minority of inhabitants called Brusseleers (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.

Toponymy

The toponyms Marols in Dutch or Marollien 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 Mariam Colentes in Latin ("those who honour the Virgin Mary"), later contracted to Maricolles/Marikollen, and finally Marolles/Marollen). Historically a working class neighbourhood, it has subsequently become a fashionable part of the city.

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."

What is Brusselian?

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.”

If you ask ten Brusselers what "Marollien" is, you get ten different answers. For some people it is French contaminated by Flemish and spoken in the neighborhood of the rue Haute and the rue Blaes, whereas for others it is Frenchified Flemish. Still others say that it is a vernacular variety of French, spoken in the whole city, etc., etc. Marollien, however, is exceptional if not unique, because it is a double language. In fact it is not between the germanic and romance languages, it is both.

— Jacques Pohl, 1953,

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.

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:

Na mooie ni paaze da'k ee da poèzeke em zitte deklameire
Allien mo vè aile t'amuzeire
Neineie... ik em aile wille demonstreire
Dat as er zain dee uile me konviksen e stuk in uilen uur drinke.
Dat da ni seulement en allien es vè te drinke.

Nu moet je niet denken dat ik hier dat gedichtje heb zitten voordragen
Alleen maar om jullie te vermaken
Neenee… ik heb jullie willen tonen
Dat er zijn die met overtuiging een stuk in hun kraag drinken.
Dat dat niet louter en alleen is om te drinken.

— In Standard Dutch

In The Adventures of Tintin

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 Khemkhâh 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 mänhir meaning "mister" (cf. Dutch mijnheer). In the original French, the fictional Arumbaya language of San Theodoros is another incarnation of Brusselian.

References

Notes

1. Baerten 1982, p. 887–897.
2. De Vriendt 2003, p. 7–8.
3. ^ Evans 2008, p. 71.
4. Johan Winkler (1874). "De stad Brussel". Algemeen Nederduitsch en Friesch Dialecticon (in Dutch). Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren. pp. 264–272. Archived from the original on January 7, 2005. Retrieved 2009-01-16.
5. Treffers-Daller, Jeanine (1994). Mixing Two Languages: French-Dutch Contact in a Comparative Perspective. Walter de Gruyter. p. 300. ISBN 3110138379. Retrieved 2013-04-26.
6. ^ Jeanine Treffers-Daller, Mixing Two Languages: French-Dutch Contact in a Comparative Perspective (Walter de Gruyter, 1994), 25.
7. Quoted Jeanine Treffers-Daller, Mixing Two Languages: French-Dutch Contact in a Comparative Perspective (Walter de Gruyter, 1994), 25.
8. State 2004, p. 356.
9. "ZWANZE: Définition de ZWANZE". www.cnrtl.fr (in French). Retrieved 2018-02-02.
10. Hughes, Dominic (15 July 2008). "Europe | Analysis: Where now for Belgium?". BBC News. Archived from the original on 19 July 2008. Retrieved 29 June 2010.
11. Philippe Van Parijs (1 March 2016). "Brussels bilingual? Brussels francophone? Both and neither!". The Brussels Times. Archived from the original on 2 May 2019.
12. Janssens, Rudi (2008). Taalgebruik in Brussel en de plaats van het Nederlands — Enkele recente bevindingen (PDF) (in Dutch) (Brussels Studies, nº13 ed.). Archived (PDF) from the original on 15 March 2016. Retrieved 2013-04-26.
13. Hergé's Syldavian

Bibliography

• Baerten, Jean (1982). "Le français à Bruxelles au Moyen-Âge. Une mise en garde". Revue belge de Philologie et d'Histoire (in French). 60 (4). Brussels: 887–897. doi:10.3406/rbph.1982.3399.
• De Vriendt, Sera (2003). Grammatica van het Brussels (in Dutch). Ghent: Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde. ISBN 978-90-72474-51-3.
• Evans, Mary Anne (2008). Frommer's Brussels and Bruges Day by Day. First Edition. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-0-470-72321-0.
• State, Paul F. (2004). Historical dictionary of Brussels. Historical dictionaries of cities of the world. Vol. 14. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. ISBN 978-0-8108-5075-0.

• Dutch dialects
• Culture in Brussels
• Languages of Belgium
• The Adventures of Tintin
• City colloquials