Everything about Nord Department totally explained
Nord is a
department in the far north of
France. It is the country's most populated department.
History
Nord comprises the French parts of the
County of Flanders, excluding the western parts separated in 1237 as the
County of Artois and now part of the neighbouring
Pas-de-Calais, and
Hainaut. This territory was part of the
Spanish Netherlands, but was ceded to France in successive treaties (1659, 1668, and 1678).
During the
4th and
5th centuries, the Roman practice of coopting Germanic tribes to provide military and defense services along the route from Boulogne to Cologne created a Germanic-Romance linguistic border in the region that persisted until the
8th century. Saxon colonization into the region from the 5th to the 8th centuries likely extended the linguistic border somewhat south so that by the
9th century most inhabitants north of Lille spoke a dialect of Middle Dutch, while the inhabitants to the south spoke a variety of Romance dialects. This linguistic border is still evident today in the place names of the region. After the 9th century, the linguistic border began to shift north and east, a process accelerated by modern government policies that recognize French as the country's official language. There are currently 20,000 speakers of a subset of the Dutch dialect
West Flemish in the arrondissement of Dunkirk and this particular subset is in danger of extinction within decades.
Nord is one of the original 83 departments that was created during the
French Revolution on
March 4,
1790.
Geography
Nord is part of the current
Nord-Pas-de-Calais region and is surrounded by the French departments of
Pas-de-Calais and
Aisne, as well as by
Belgium and the
North Sea.
Situated in the north of the country along the western half of the Belgian frontier, the department is unusually long and narrow. Its principal city is
Lille, which with nearby
Roubaix,
Tourcoing and
Villeneuve d'Ascq constitutes the center of a cluster of industrial and former mining towns totalling slightly over a million inhabitants. Other important cities are
Valenciennes,
Douai, and
Dunkirk.
The principal rivers are the following:
Economy
At the forefront of France's
19th century industrialisation, the area suffered severely during
World War I and now faces the economic, social and environmental problems associated with the decline of
coal mining with its neighbours following the earlier decline of the Lille-Roubaix textile industry.
Until recently, the department was dominated economically by coal mining, which extended through the heart of the department from neighbouring
Artois into central
Belgium.
Demographics
Nord is the most heavily populated department, with a population of 2,583,493 and an area of 5,743 km².
Further Information
Get more info on 'Nord Department'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://nord__department.totallyexplained.com">Nord (department) Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
