Wisconsin Walloon is a heritage dialect of a threatened language in the langue d'oïl family that originated in southern Belgium and expanded to northeastern Wisconsin, USA in the mid-1850s. Walloon-speaking immigrants formed an isolated agricultural community, passing on and using the language for the next two generations until English became the…

We report on three experiments that aim at measuring the role of prosody in the acceptability and interpretation of discourse relations between utterances connected by two French discourse markers, viz. "et" "and" and "alors" "then/well." These two discourse markers are highly polyfunctional: "et"…

This paper addresses the complex multilingual linguistic landscapes (LLs) of three strategically-chosen areas in global city Brussels by examining how language displays on public signage in these areas are used for different purposes, functions or intentions. The focus will be on meaning-construction in the post-Fordist globalised era as shaped by…

This is a report on the different types of studies of the regional varieties of French that have been carried out in Belgium from 1945 to the present. The majority of the studies have been done by Belgians, and have to do with regional varieties of French spoken in Belgium. Some, however, examine African or American varieties. Chapter 1 deals with…

While the concepts of language continuum and diglossia are widely cited and discussed, they remain generally vague and are used in different ways by different linguists. Recent sociolinguistic research on Dutch-speaking Belgium provides a framework for examining the two concepts, a context for proposing a theoretical definition for language…

A summary of the state of English language instruction in Belgium outlines the role and status of English usage in that country; English instruction at 11 levels of the instructional system, including elementary and secondary education in Flanders, Wallonia, and Brussels, university instruction, examinations, and correspondence courses; English…