L'Alsace


Alsace is the Germanic region of France.istorically speaking, Alsace was part of the German-speaking area of central Europe, and to this day a large proportion of the population, of all generations, speak or understand Alsacian, a dialectal form of German closely resembling the German spoken in Switzerland.
In terms of heritage and culture, with its villages of brightly-painted steep-roofed half-timbered houses, Alsace is definitely germanic. While today people are free - within limits - to choose what colour to paint a building, in the past the colours had a significance, and town houses, which often had shops or boutiques on the ground floor, were painted according to the type of shop - bakeries in one colour, butchers in another, shoemakers in a third colour, and so on. Today that is no longer the case, but the tradition of brightly coloured half-timbered houses has become firmly established as the local Alsatian style

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