Talk:French Flanders

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[edit] French Flanders vs. French Westhoek (Maritime Flanders)

"Why sourced linguistic information would be removed I have no idea. The geography and WW2 information is unsourced, but whatever... 03:59, 27 July 2007 CharlesMartel" Copied from edit summary.

As the edit summary notes, the sourced info you are referring to was not removed. It was moved intact with references to Westhoek (region) because it only applies to that region, not to all of French Flanders. The Romance Flanders (southeastern) half of French Flanders has never been Dutch-speaking (or not for a millenium anyway). Sentences such as "The traditional language of the French Flanders region is a dialect of the Dutch language known as West Flemish...It was once the dominant language of the region..."[1] imply that all of French Flanders was relatively recently Dutch speaking when such is only the case for French Westhoek. Hence the move.

As far as the "unsourced" additions, they are from fr:Flandre française, nl:Frans-Vlaanderen, and other English Wikipedia pages such as Reichskommissar and Picard language. Since these are other Wikipedia pages, they are not citable but have been potentially subject to the same oversight as any Wikpedia page.

It is clear from the French and Dutch articles as well as sources such as ones cited here and here that French Flanders includes more than just French Westhoek (~Arrondissement of Dunkirk). However, the article and its images dealt only with Westhoek so I expanded the article to include the non-Westhoek areas of Lille (the center of French Flanders) and Douai and moved the information exclusively on Westhoek to its own article.

— AjaxSmack  06:17, 27 July 2007 (UTC)