Christian Bernet, Labaroche

They are Welche. And they live in the foothills of the Vosges. No, I am not talking about Romands [French-speaking Swiss] exiled for heaven-knows-what. These Welche are Alsatian through and through, and have been since time immemorial. If they share the name Welche with the Romands, it is because this Germanic term means 'one who does not speak German'. There, the similarity ends.

For the Welche of the Upper Rhine, sandwiched between Germanic and French influences, enjoy the distinction of having preserved their dialect intact right up to the end of this century. A glossary of the Welche language will be published this autumn. The dying breath, one might say, of a doomed tongue.

The Welche region is an historical anomaly. Situated a few dozen kilometres [1 Km =5 eighths of a mile] to the west of Colmar, it nestles in a valley which opens onto the Rhine plain.

"Ever since the Germanic invasions of the third century, we have almost always lived under a German-speaking government. And yet our people speak a Romance tongue", explains historian Yvette Baradel, who is involved in bringing out the glossary.

How does one explain this Latin pocket in a German region? Some say that it provided a refuge for the Romance peoples of the Rhine plain, driven out by Germanic tribes. Yvette Baradel, however, believes these wild regions were peopled by settlers from Lorraine, encouraged perhaps by monks or the local nobles. The fact remains that the dialect endured up until the Second World War, only to decline in the 1950s.

Henri Baradel, a retired linguist from Fréland, one of the five communities of the Welche region which has in all some 9,000 inhabitants, quickly explains, "Look, it's not some past-its-sell-by-date dialect, but a highly-structured language, with a rigorous grammar and syntax."

That is why Welche always places the adjective before the noun, and has two forms of the imperfect, acording to whether the action took place on the same day or a previous day.

"There's a right way to speak our dialect, and you can tell at once if someone has only a rough knowledge", adds Jean-François Million, a primary school [US grade or elementary school] teacher from Labaroche.

For the uninitiated, it is very difficult to understand a conversation, even if most of the words are like French. Welche is to French what Swiss-German is to High German. One should add that, like French, the dialect has its origins in the Vulgar Latin imposed by the Romans after the conquest of Gaul. However, its geographical location meant that it assimilated Germanic terms, like brantvi (Brandwein) instead of eau-de-vie [brandy].

The geographical seclusion of the Welche region, its rural, almost self-sufficient, economy, and its Catholicism, all helped to preserve the dialect up until the middle of this century. And the forty-year Prussian occupation of Alsace (from 1870 to the First World War) did not weaken its robustness. At the time of the Second World War, the German prohibition on the speaking of French even gave it a last boost. However, its decline had long been foreshadowed. The assimilationist ideology of the Republic has some bearing on this.

"My teacher forbade us to speak the dialect in the school playground", recalls Camille Parmentier, an elderly resident of Labaroche.

This sense of identity became a handicap, more than anything, as outside contact increased.

"Even back then my father used to tell me that speaking our dialect wouldn't get you any further than Hachimette, at the entrance to the valley" remembers Paul Dechristé, another Labaroche pensioner. As well as television and radio, new arrivals, attracted by the tranquility of the locality, completed the 'Frenchifying' of the valley. Today, only the old still speak the dialect. Without much hope of reviving it.

"We haven't got a literature, or songs, or poetry or theatre to keep it alive", laments Jean-François Million. No aspect of identity sufficiently compelling to win over the young to the dialect.

One may call the Welche 'Shorthouses', because they are smaller in stature than the 'Germans', but it is hard to distinguish any truly specific culture. And if the villages do not have that chocolate-box apearance so typical of Alsace, it is because they are more like a village, any village, in the rest of France.

"No n'vlo mi peud le patwé" (we don't want to lose the dialect (nous ne voulons pas perdre le patois)) say the car stickers of a group of elderly people who, meeting in the Welche-speaking Academy of Labaroche, published the first vocabulary ten years ago. This cry from the heart is as moving as the song of a dying swan.

The Welche harbour no illusions. "In twenty or thirty years there will be no one left to speak the dialect," Jean-François Million acknowledges. "Only these books will save it from oblivion."