Brusselian dialect

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^[1][2] that incorporates a sprinkle of Spanish loanwords dating back to the rule of the Low Countries by the Habsburgs (1519–1713).^[3]

Brusselian was widely spoken in the Marolles/Marollen neighbourhood of the City of Brussels until the 20th century.^[3] It still survives among a small minority of inhabitants called Brusseleers^[3] (or Brusseleirs), many of them quite bi- and multilingual in French and Dutch.^[4][5]

The Royal Theatre Toone, a folkloric theatre of marionettes in central Brussels, still puts on puppet plays in Brusselian.^[3]

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.^[3]

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."^[3]

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.^[6] According to Jeanine Treffers-Daller, “the dialect has a tremendous prestige and a lot of myths are doing the rounds.”^[6]

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, ^[7]

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.^[8][9]

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,^[10][11] even though French has become the predominant language of the city.^[12]

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 [mensen] zijn die met overtuiging een stuk in hun kraag drinken.
Dat dat niet louter en alleen is om te drinken.

— In Standard Dutch

For the popular comic series The Adventures of Tintin, the Brussels author Hergé modelled his fictional languages Syldavian^[13] 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.

• 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.