Belgicism - Different Types of Belgicisms

Different Types of Belgicisms

One can point to:

• phonetic belgicisms, which are not written differently from standard French words, but are pronounced differently:
  • Many Belgians pronounce /ɥi/ like /wi/, unlike French speakers of French. Most French individuals notice a difference between the two sounds, but many Belgians do not. Another difference in pronunciation stems from how loan words with the letter 'w' are pronounced. Belgian Francophones tend to always pronounce w as /w/ in words like wagon /waɡɔ̃/ whereas in Standard French, this would be pronounced /vaɡɔ̃/, since French Francophones generally pronounce /w/ like /v/.
  • The distinction between the nasal vowels /ɛ̃/ and /œ̃/ is upheld, whereas in many regions of France, these two sounds have merged. Thus, although for many French people, brin (stalk) and brun (brown), are homophones, for Belgians they are not.
  • Another unusual aspect of Belgian French is the clear difference between the pronunciation of 'ai' and 'ais' at the end of a word. Belgians pronounced the first like an /e/ and the second like an /ɛ/. As a consequence, Belgians rarely confuse the future tense and conditional when writing.
  • Belgian speakers pronounce the final T in certain words that some French do not: for example, huit (eight) and vingt (twenty) are pronounced /wɪt/ and /vɛ̃t/ respectively.
• Archaic belgicisms that come from the foreign rule over Belgium in the past. Belgium has been occupied by Dutch, English, Spanish, Austrian, French and German powers, and all of which have indubitably laid a footprint on Belgian French. Also worth mentioning is the use of 'septante' and 'nonante' for 70 and 90 respectively. Although these words are used in Switzerland and in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in the rest of the Francophone world, the ventigesimal 'soixante-dix' and 'quatre-vingt-dix' are used.

• Belgicisms that were manufactured by the Belgian government. Like France and Québec, Belgium too has an administration in place to prescribe language use. Belgium undertook a series of measures to combat linguistic sexism by creating feminine versions of masculine gender occupations. For example, professeur and docteur had no feminine-gender equivalent words, even though many women had these occupations. In March 1989, the Belgian administration prescribed that all jobs would have a grammatically masculine and feminine form (le docteur could be la doctoresse.) This feminization of words has no official equivalent in metropolitan France.

• Belgicisms of Germanic origin such as the word bourgmestre which comes from the Dutch Burgemeester and refers to the chief magistrate of a village.

• Belgicisms with different meanings to other variants of French. Some words have a different meaning in Belgium from those in other Francophone countries:
  • La cassonade in Belgium is a light or dark brown sugar extracted from beets; in Québec, it is a brown cane sugar.
  • outre-Quiévrain is used to refer to Belgium by the French, and to France by the Belgians; Quiévrain is the border crossing point on the old main Paris-Brussels railway line.