Walloon Alphabet & Letters

Walloon (walon) is a Romance language of the langue d’oïl family, a sister of French and Picard rather than a dialect of French, spoken in Wallonia, the southern half of Belgium. It is written in the Latin alphabet with the 26 letters A–Z and the accented vowels a French reader knows, à â é è ê î ô û ù. What sets a Walloon text apart at first sight is å, the a with a ring above.

Walloon has two spelling traditions. The Feller system, worked out by the philologist Jules Feller around 1900, writes each local dialect as it sounds, so the same word looks different in Liège, Namur and Charleroi. The rifondou walon (unified Walloon), developed from the late 1990s, gives each word one spelling for all dialects and lets every reader pronounce it the local way; the Walloon Wikipedia, for one, is written in it.

Beyond the core set, CLDR also lists ç ë ï ü ÿ æ œ for Walloon. They are less frequent: ç and œ mostly in words and names shared with French, ë in some local spellings. All of them are on this page in both cases.

Walloon letters: å, the circumflex, xh and dj

å is one letter for a sound that differs across Wallonia: around Liège it is a long open o, like the vowel of English law; around Namur and Charleroi it is a long a. Writing å lets one spelling serve both, as in djåzer (to speak) and Tchålerwè, the Walloon name of Charleroi.

The circumflex â ê î ô û marks a long vowel, as it does in Feller-style Picard, not a lost s as in French. é is a closed e and è an open one. Capitals keep their marks: Å, Ê, É.

Walloon writes the sounds of English j and ch as dj and tch: dji (I), Bondjoû (good day), Tchantchès, the puppet hero of Liège. The rifondou spelling adds xh and jh for sounds that move across the map: måjhon (house) is said with an h in Liège and with the zh of French j further west. The xh comes from old Liège writing and still stands in place names and surnames such as Xhoris and Xhoffraix, where it is pronounced as an h.

Walloon punctuation: the apostrophe and « » quotes

Walloon drops short vowels all the time, and each one leaves an apostrophe: Dji m’ lome Marie (my name is Marie), A r’vey (goodbye), d’ and l’. Walloon writers often leave a space after the apostrophe of a dropped pronoun, as in m’ lome. The typographic apostrophe ’ is the one used in print.

Quotations follow French typography: guillemets « » with a space inside, “ ” for a quote within a quote, and a space before ! and ? in carefully set text. Prices are written as in the rest of Belgium, with the euro sign after the amount: 5 €.

How to type å and the other Walloon letters

Windows: hold Alt and type on the number pad å 0229 and Å 0197; the other letters are à 0224, â 0226, é 0233, è 0232, ê 0234, ë 0235, î 0238, ô 0244, ù 0249, û 0251, ç 0231, œ 0156, À 0192,  0194, É 0201, È 0200, Ê 0202, Î 0206, Ô 0212, Ù 0217, Û 0219, « 0171, » 0187, ’ 0146, € 0128. With the United States-International layout, AltGr + W gives å and AltGr + Shift + W gives Å; ' then e gives é, ` then e gives è, ^ then a vowel gives the circumflex.

Belgian AZERTY keyboards have é, è, à, ç and ù on their own keys and dead keys for ^ and ¨, so the accented vowels and ç are a keystroke or two away; å, æ and œ need the Alt code or another layout. Mac: Option + A gives å and Option + Shift + A gives Å; Option + E then a vowel for é, Option + ` then a vowel for è à ù, Option + I then a vowel for â ê î ô û. Phones: long-press a and pick å, and long-press the other vowels for their accented forms. HTML: å and Å, plus ê, è, « and ».

Where Walloon is spoken, and Walloon vs French

Walloon is spoken in Wallonia 🇧🇪, in four main dialect areas: the east around Liège, the centre around Namur, the west around Charleroi and the south around Bastogne. CLDR estimates around 700,000 speakers, most of them older people who also speak French. In 1990 the French Community of Belgium recognised Walloon as a regional language of its own. Across the border it is also heard around Givet in the French Ardennes, and in the 1850s Walloon emigrants took it to northeastern Wisconsin, where villages are named Namur and Brussels.

Walloon and French come from the same Latin and share most of their letters, but Walloon has its own grammar, sounds and words, many of them shaped by its Germanic neighbours. Within Belgium it borders the Picard of western Hainaut, the Lorrain of the Gaume, Luxembourgish around Arlon, and Dutch and German to the north and east. Each of those has its own collection here, as do French and the country, Belgium.