Abstract
The French language has been progressively moulded through contact with neighbouring languages. However, the Anglo-Saxon tidal wave that followed the Second World War has provoked numerous reactions of defence and promotion of French. This paper studies the specificities of the link to English in French-speaking Belgium. First, it seems that from a linguistic point of view, French in Belgium shows a higher degree of tolerance towards English on lexical and phonetic levels. Moreover, if the Belgian language legislation is strongly influenced - in its spirit and in its words - by the French example, it has acquired more autonomy in the 1990s, for example in the decree of 21 June 1993 concerning the feminisation of profession names, functions, ranks and titles. The action of public bodies in favour of the French language is then evoked. Given the attention devoted to community problems, these initiatives have appeared fairly late and evolved from a defensive attitude towards a policy of promotion of French. ...
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