ited Vaals on a daily basis, a trade exchange still taking place today. Many inhabitants of Vaals found jobs in Aachen and smuggle routes across the border prospered. The smugglers of Vaal were called "The Owls of Vaals", referring to their nightly endeavours. To this day, Vaals is a tourist site, gathering its income mostly from German, Belgian and Dutch tourists, as well as being a shopping centre for especially Germans.
The village of Vaals can be interpreted as a Dutch suburb to the German city of Aachen. A quarter of the inhabitants are German and the village is well embedded in the Aachen local transport system.
The dialect of Vaals is a part of the Middle German Dialects and is the form of Dutch most deviant from Standard Dutch. Together with the dialect of Cologne, it is a part of theRipuarian language family. It sounds more German than Dutch, partially explained because German has been the shared cultural language of the municipality for centuries, and in some ways, it still is
