International audience ; In the prosodic phonology of Southern (Belgian) Dutch there are certain resemblances with French. The phenomena in question concern resyllabification across word boundaries and vowel deletion in order to optimize syllable structure. In earlier articles (Noske 2005, 2007), it was claimed that these resemblances are a direct result of the language contact with French. However, closer inspection of historical data reveals that the phenomena in question are part of the prosodic typology of early West-Germanic in general. Hence it is Northern Dutch, together with many other West-Germanic dialects, that has undergone an a prosodic-typological innovation, whereas Southern Dutch has not changed. The change was one from the syllable counting language type to the stress counting type. It was undergone by many centrally located West-Germanic dialects, among which Northern Dutch and High German. This has important bearings on our understanding of the history of French: it has been claimed by several scholars that vowel reduction in the early history of French was the result of a heavy expiratory (intensity) stress in the Franconian superstrate. I will argue that Franconian was mostly of the syllable counting type and hence cannot have had a strong intensity accent. This means that French schwa cannot have Germanic as its direct source. This point of view will be strengthened by an investigation of the relative chronology of schwa deletion in French and Germanic as well as by a comparison of the parallel Romance and Germanic texts of the Strasbourg Oath ; Dans la phonologie prosodique du néerlandais méridional (de Belgique) on trouve certaines ressemblances avec le français. Les phénomènes en question sont la résyllabification à travers les frontières de morphème et l'effacement de voyelle afin d'optimiser la structure syllabique. Dans des articles antérieurs (Noske 2005, 2007) j'ai suggéré que ces ressemblances découlent directement du contact avec le français. Cependant, un examen plus précis des ...