Why do people speak flanders in flanders and not flanders? Why is it Flanders and not Flanders?

Answer

Dear Marina,

There are more related words that have a slightly different form. For example, compare the noun name and the verb to call, or the noun gift and the verb to give. Usually such small differences between words can be explained by historical developments in the language.

Something similar will also be the case in the case of Flanders, the place name, and Flemish, the adjective. The only question is what exactly happened to make Flanders and Flemish different from each other.

In the case of Flanders and Flemish, this turns out to be a difficult question, because the etymology of Flanders and Flemish is uncertain.

According to one possible etymology, Vlaming and Flanders both go back to an old (and hypothetical) word flâm, which would have meant ‘stream’ (think of flow or the English flow), and by extension ‘swampy land’ (a Fleming was then ‘coming from swampy land’; and Flanders meant something like ‘area with streams, swallow’). According to that statement, the m of Flemish and Fleming is the original form and the n in Flanders is the deviation. That is not implausible, because a similar deviation also occurs elsewhere; think, for example, of shame with an n, which is related to shame with an m – not coincidentally, just like in Flanders, the n in shame is just before a d.

However, another etymology states that the n was the original sound, and the m arose afterwards. According to that etymology, the Flemish were originally Flandwari, that is, ‘inhabitants of foreign countries’ (wari are ‘guardians’, think of bewarand, and by extension ‘residents’; fland, on the other hand, consists of land, which simply meant ‘land’ and an f which comes from ut, ‘outside’, think of out; the assumption is then that the original Flanders was a poorly habitable piece of land on the coast in West Flanders that belonged to no one and was therefore ‘foreign’). However, the d of Flandwari would have disappeared, and as a result the n came to stand just before a w and those two sounds melted together into m. That also happens more often, just think of the dialect pronunciation of go as game or gomme.

A rather complicated story, unfortunately without a conclusive explanation, but with two reasonably plausible possibilities.

Source: J. Dupont. 1960. Etymological study of Flanders, Vlaming, vlamsch. Proceedings of the Royal Commission on Toponymy and Dialectology 34:77-132.