Nord-Pas de Calais - Demographics

Demographics

While the region is predominantly French-speaking, it also has two significant minority language communities: the western Flemings, whose presence is evident in the many Dutch place names in the area and who speak West Flemish, a dialect of Dutch (perhaps 20,000 inhabitants of Nord-Pas-de-Calais use Flemish daily and an estimated 40,000 use it occasionally, both, primarily in and around the arrondissement of Dunkirk ); and the Picards, who speak the Picard language, or Ch'ti (speakers, "chitimi", have been working to revive the nearly-extinct regional speech since the 1980s). Although neighbouring Belgium currently recognizes and fosters both Picard and Dutch, and a few city-level governments within Nord-Pas-de-Calais have introduced initiatives to encourage both languages, the national French government maintains a policy of linguistic unity and generally ignores both languages, as it does with other regional languages in France.

The region's ethnic diversity has been affected by repeated waves of immigrant workers from abroad: Belgians before 1910; Poles and Italians in the 1920s and 1930s; Italians and Germans since 1945 and North Africans and Portuguese since 1960; and large cities like Lille, Calais, and Boulogne are home to sizable communities of British, Dutch, Scandinavian, Sub-Saharan African, and Latin American immigrants and their descendants.

The French state has sought to boost the region's relatively neglected culture. In 2004, it was announced that a branch of the Louvre would be opened in the city of Lens. For decades, the Nord-Pas-de-Calais has been viewed as a conservative region when compared culturally to the rest of France, but recently the region has at times displayed left-wing tendencies. In the early 2000s, the leftist Green Party won the largest number of votes to nearly carry a majority in regional and local representation. The Greens managed to attract many conservative voters from small towns and farmers moved by the Greens' commitment to boosting agri-industry.

The region's religious profile is representative of France as a whole, with the majority (85%) being Roman Catholic, but not all members regularly attend church or practice every element of Roman Catholicism. Other Christian groups are found in the region: Protestants have a few churches. North Africans have introduced Islam to the region, and small but growing communities of Buddhists have been established in recent years. In World War II, 18,000 of the region's French Jews were victims of the Nazi occupation, but a small Jewish community remains active as it has been for hundreds of years.