Medieval Scripta '' Early texts written in the region of
Wallonia were composed in
Medieval Latin, such as the 7th century
Vita Sanctae Geretrudis. In the 9th century, the first texts written in the vernacular ''
langue d'oïl appear in northern Gaul. One of the earliest of these documents, the Sequence of Saint Eulalia from around 880, shows regional traits of Walloon, Champenois, and Picard. The medieval written language, often referred to as the scripta'', From this time forward, writing in Wallonia underwent "cycles of purification", moving progressively closer and closer to the standard of the
French language. Walloon
toponyms and proper nouns, as well as some words for common objects could be found written in dialect, often spelled in distinctive ways, using
graphemes like ⟨xh⟩ and ⟨ea⟩.
Early texts Beginning around 1600 some of the first "truly" Walloon documents appear, mostly in the
Liège dialect. These include letters, poems, and works commenting on religious and political affairs. Spelling during this early period was inconsistent, as evidenced by different published names of the 1757
opéra comique : • , ed. 1757 • , ed. 1784 • , ed. 1830 • , ed. 1858 • , ed. 1878 The 19th century saw a flourishing of Walloon literature. In 1856 the (Liège Society of Walloon Literature) was founded, later renamed the (Society of Walloon Language and Literature, SLLW). The Society promoted artistic works in the Walloon language as well as works of
philology and
dialectology. From the beginning, the SLLW was interested in solving the issue that there was no unified system of spelling for the Walloon language. Several orthographies were proposed, such as the more
phonemic orthography of Charles-Nicolas Simonon (using such novel letters as ⟨ɹ⟩ and ⟨ñ⟩) and the orthography of Nicolas Pietkin, which made extensive analogy with
French orthography. The most influential proposal, however, was that of dialectologist Jules Feller, the creator of the
Feller system. Despite these difficulties, what became known as the was adopted throughout the region, and the majority of Walloon publications for the next century were written in some variation of Feller's orthography. Inspired by the examples of other regional languages like
Romansh,
Breton, and
Occitan, the (initial creators of the orthography) sought to unify the spelling of words across the region. During the 1990s, they formulated a new proposal, the , referred to in English as the "normalised spelling", "Common Written Walloon", or "Common Walloon". Common Walloon has been met with some resistance, notably in the 1996 article by Jean Lechanteur, published by the . The orthography has a strong presence on the internet, with the
Walloon Wikipedia and
Walloon Wiktionary both written using the normalized spelling. ==Graphemes==