French Influence on West Flemish

This article investigates the origin of West Flemish composite plural pronouns of the type winder ‘we’, jinder~ginder ‘you’, and zinder ‘they’. These forms are of particular interest to contact linguistics, given that very similar ones found their way into the three Dutch-lexicon creoles that were once spoken in the Caribbean. Whereas the first part of these composite pronouns clearly contains a simplex pronominal root, this article is concerned with the etymon of the second, suffixed component, ‑ nder . The reigning consensus is that all Dutch dialectal plural compound pronouns, including the West Flemish forms in ‑ nder , were construed with the Dutch noun lieden ‘people’. We consider an alternative etymology involving ander ‘other’ and propose that the forms were calqued on Belgian French pronouns of the type nous / vous / eux autres , thus representing a salient case of French-Dutch language contact.