Walloon

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A member of a French-speaking ethnic group in Belgium, known for its unique cultural identity and traditions
2. An individual from a region in Belgium where a dialect of French is spoken, representing a blend of local heritage and history
3. A person who belongs to the French-speaking community in the southern part of Belgium known for its distinct language and culture

Etymology: The people now called Walloons were named by their Germanic-speaking neighbours, and the name is older than any notion of a Belgian nation. It comes from a Frankish word "walh", which meant "foreigner", and it reached Middle French as "wallon". The same root sits behind a surprising family of names: Welsh and Wales, Cornwall's second half, Gaul, and Wallachia in eastern Europe. In each case a Germanic speaker applied it to Romance- or Celtic-speaking peoples living beside them, so the Walloons share their name with the Welsh and the Gauls, all of whom were "foreigners" in someone else's ears. The word also points to the first-part sense of "walnut", which was originally a tree of the "foreign nut", a nut brought from outside Germanic lands.