Can 22 Walloon sayings carved into Liège’s streets keep a language alive?

Liège has extended its “Sur les Pavés, l’Adage” cultural trail into Outremeuse, adding ten engraved stones during the neighbourhood’s August festivities and bringing the citywide route to 22 Walloon sayings. The project’s website now lists the complete trail, from the historic centre to Saint-Pholien, Rue Roture, the Tchantchès landmarks and Boulevard Saucy.

For residents, newcomers and visitors, this is more than decorative paving. The stones place Liège’s regional language where daily life happens, while an accompanying website provides explanations, recordings and translations in French, Dutch, German and English. That multilingual layer is especially useful in a Belgian city whose cultural identity is strongly local but whose universities, businesses and tourist sites draw an international public.

The first 12 blue-stone slabs were inaugurated on 26 June 2025 in central Liège. Liège Demain, the non-profit organisation that helped develop the initiative, subsequently announced a second phase of ten stones in Outremeuse. Its president, Alain Mager, described the original route as an expression of attachment to local roots, traditions and folklore. The completed project is now led by the Adages non-profit association and built around sayings devised by Paul-Henri Thomsin.

Each expression is connected to its immediate surroundings. The route moves past institutions and monuments including the Musée de la Vie wallonne, the Perron, the Palais des Princes-Évêques and Montagne de Bueren before crossing the Meuse into Outremeuse. There, the locations include Saint-Pholien church, Maison Grétry, Rue Roture, the Musée Tchantchès and the monument to Tchantchès, the neighbourhood’s famously irreverent puppet figure.

The organisers present the slabs as invitations rather than language lessons. Their stated aim is to make passers-by curious about unfamiliar words, then use the digital material to explain both the expression and the nearby site. The project website calls the sayings “a living heritage” and says the purpose is to pass popular expressions to future generations while supporting local culture and craftspeople.

That framing reflects one view of language preservation: visibility can restore familiarity. A regional language confined to specialist publications or ceremonial occasions risks appearing remote; a phrase encountered underfoot can instead become part of an ordinary walk. The Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles has recognised Walloon, Picard, Gaumais and Champenois as endogenous regional languages and cultural heritage since the 1990s, according to the Walloon government’s historical portal.

The institutional perspective is more cautious about what such symbolic projects can achieve alone. The same official history notes limited financial resources, the absence of a shared strategy for the future use of the regional languages and the rupture of intergenerational transmission after the Second World War. On that reading, stone gives Walloon permanence in the streets, but lasting linguistic vitality also requires speakers, teaching, creative work and opportunities for everyday use.

The initiative therefore reveals a wider European tension without becoming an EU policy story. Communities across Europe increasingly use public art, digital interpretation and cultural tourism to make minority or regional languages visible. Yet the European institutions in Brussels did not organise or fund this Liège project, and no specific EU response has been identified. Its centre of gravity remains firmly local: a Walloon-speaking city deciding how its inherited language should sound and look in contemporary public space.

The immediate outcome is a free walking route linking 22 expressions with 22 places. What remains unclear is how the organisers will measure use of the trail, whether further neighbourhoods will receive slabs, and whether schools or cultural institutions will incorporate the material into sustained language programmes. The next test is not whether the engraved words endure—they are designed to—but whether people stop, listen and begin using some of them again.