Yes archeologists in Flanders recently discovered an ancient “Deviatium / Weghomleginck” sign.
Yes, because Flanders was a bilingual Flemish-French (Picardic to be precise) state and Latin was the lingua franca of Europe. It has long been established that all ranks of society in Flanders spoke multiple languages to varying degrees, until the Flemish movement started pushing for the concept of a language border to ‘reverse Frenchification’ and ‘purify the uncivilized Flemish dialects’ in favor of Hollandic Dutch. From that point onwards the narrative became that there always was a language border and research around it dried up under political pressure. From the 1930’s onwards there were these insane ideas that Flemish grammar and vocabulary had somehow become polluted by Romance (read: non-Germanic) influence and that they should be purified as quickly as possible to return to their pure, Germanic roots. Not so fun fact: is for this reason that the Flemish weren’t considered full ‘Germanic people’ by the Nazi’s and German women were dissuaded from marrying them.
Monolingual states are the exception, not the rule. Brabant and Liège/Loon were multilingual as well.
The past was far more varied and culturally mixed then official books try to pretend.
3 comments
Yes archeologists in Flanders recently discovered an ancient “Deviatium / Weghomleginck” sign.
Yes, because Flanders was a bilingual Flemish-French (Picardic to be precise) state and Latin was the lingua franca of Europe. It has long been established that all ranks of society in Flanders spoke multiple languages to varying degrees, until the Flemish movement started pushing for the concept of a language border to ‘reverse Frenchification’ and ‘purify the uncivilized Flemish dialects’ in favor of Hollandic Dutch. From that point onwards the narrative became that there always was a language border and research around it dried up under political pressure. From the 1930’s onwards there were these insane ideas that Flemish grammar and vocabulary had somehow become polluted by Romance (read: non-Germanic) influence and that they should be purified as quickly as possible to return to their pure, Germanic roots. Not so fun fact: is for this reason that the Flemish weren’t considered full ‘Germanic people’ by the Nazi’s and German women were dissuaded from marrying them.
Monolingual states are the exception, not the rule. Brabant and Liège/Loon were multilingual as well.
The past was far more varied and culturally mixed then official books try to pretend.
Anthropology reveals this quite clearly.