A very urban population
Belgium has 11.7 million inhabitants in an area of 30,527 km². One of the highest densities in the world (385 inh./km²), the second highest in Europe behind neighboring Netherlands and Malta. 98% of Belgium's population is urban, reflecting the country's high population density. Brussels-Capital has 19 communes and 1.2 million inhabitants, mainly comprising Brussels (179,000 inhabitants), Schaerbeek (133,000 inhabitants) and Anderlecht (118,000 inhabitants). Antwerp is the country's second-largest conurbation, with roughly the same population, but much larger than Brussels (523,000). Next comes the dynamic university city of Ghent (260,000 inhabitants), then Charleroi (202,000 inhabitants) and Liège (197,000 inhabitants), followed by Bruges (118,000 inhabitants), Namur (111,000 inhabitants) and finally Leuven (101,000 inhabitants).
The three communities
"Belgium is a federal state composed of Communities and Regions This article, which appears at the beginning of the text of the Belgian Constitution, establishes the fact that the kingdom cannot be understood in a uniform way. Three Communities, each based on its own linguistic culture, form the basis of the Belgian identity. To the north of a horizontal line passing just below Brussels is the Flemish Community. The French Community (the legal name of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation) shares the south of the country with the German-speaking Community, located in the east, near Liège with Eupen as its capital. As the capital is officially bilingual, the Flemish Community and the Wallonia-Brussels Federation manage their respective policies (such as education) separately in Brussels. Brussels is the capital of both the Flemish Community and the Wallonia-Brussels Federation.
This division is not without some disparities between the subjects of the same kingdom. First of all, their numbers are not equal: the Flemish are 6.3 million, the French 4.6 million and the German-speaking only 75,000. In addition, there are economic differences: Flanders, which is more open to the world market thanks to its port history, is richer than its Walloon neighbor.
The three Belgian Regions
The Flemish Region (6.7 million inhabitants) comprises the provinces of Flemish Brabant, West Flanders, East Flanders, Antwerp and Limburg. Brussels is the capital of the Flemish Region. Over time, it has merged with the Flemish Community.
The Walloon Region (3.6 million inhabitants) comprises the provinces of Hainaut, Namur and Liège (which includes the German-speaking eastern cantons). Namur is the capital.
Finally, the Brussels-Capital Region (1.2 million inhabitants), although geographically located within the Flemish Region, is an independent region. It comprises the 19 communes of the Brussels-Capital district, and is officially bilingual.
A stubborn language border
In fact, one often hears Belgians themselves speak of a "linguistic frontier", which is enough to imagine the level of misunderstanding, the respective lack of knowledge and a populist tendency that adorns political programs. The influence of the State is in free fall in the face of community interests. The collective interest is diminishing and undermining a long-standing principle of governance based on solidarity. Demands for profound institutional change have reached a peak in recent years.
But in an attempt to definitively divide the north from the south... what about the Brussels region? It remains the eternal bone of contention when political leaders sit down together to at least preserve another very Belgian principle: consensus..
His Majesty the King of the Belgians
The eldest son of King Albert II and Queen Paola, Prince Philippe was born on April 15, 1960. Since July 21, 2013, he has been King of the Belgians. After military training, he studied at Stanford University in California, where he obtained a Master's degree in political science, becoming the first member of the Belgian royal family to hold a university degree. A long-standing bachelor, in 1999 he married Mathilde d'Udekem d'Acoz, a young speech therapist. Her infectious enthusiasm, bilingualism, simplicity and good taste endeared her to royalists and non-royalists alike. Mathilde gave birth to Princess Elisabeth on October 25, 2001, followed by Prince Gabriel on August 20, 2003, Prince Emmanuel on October 4, 2005, and Princess Eleanor on April 16, 2008. King Philippe is not universally appreciated, however: he is often criticized by a certain Flemish media-political elite who see him as a sort of Gaston Lagaffe, clumsy, gauche and borrowed. Whatever they think, Philippe remains "His Majesty the King of the Belgians".
A cosmopolitan country
Belgium, like every other Western country, is home to a large number of foreigners. An urban cosmopolitan environment, where nearly 971,0000 foreigners are counted on its soil. At the top of the list are the Moroccans, followed by the Italians, the French, the Dutch and the Turks.
Other nationalities account for no more than 25,000 people per community. Immigration is very unevenly distributed across the kingdom: Brussels has 35% foreigners, while Wallonia and Flanders have 10% of the total populations in these regions. Integration is not as straightforward as it often is.
While second- and third-generation Italians are now perfectly integrated and accepted by Belgian society, other populations, particularly North Africans, are encountering the same problems of xenophobia that Italians faced just a few decades ago. Paradoxically, it is in Flanders that the xenophobic far right is on the rise, where foreigners have long been less numerous than in other regions.
The problem is particularly acute in Antwerp, where 53% of the population is allochthonous and, in some parts of the city, 80% of the population is of foreign origin. In Flanders as a whole, the results of the Flemish nationalist party NV-A, now the country's No. 1 political force since the last federal parliamentary elections in 2019, and those of the far-right Vlaams Belang (No. 2 party in Flanders), unfortunately give a frequent impression of inward-looking attitudes.
The different languages of the country
In Belgium, this subject could be the subject of entire libraries. A few clarifications are therefore necessary! In Belgium, there is a border that separates the country's two main linguistic communities: the Dutch-speaking and the French-speaking. It is the result of language laws enacted in the 1960s and 1990s. But the nuances are much more complex. The nineteen municipalities of the Brussels conurbation constitute a bilingual enclave in the heart of Flemish Brabant. For the Flemish, French is a language learned at school alongside English. Their mother tongue is usually a dialect of Dutch. The older ones often speak French (very) well, while the younger ones clearly prefer English. Please note that the fast and vernacular French of France or Quebec is not necessarily understandable for your Flemish interlocutor.
Dutch and Flemish
Dutch is the Germanic language spoken by Dutch-speaking Belgians. Covering many dialects in the Netherlands and Belgium, three families of Dutch are present on the Belgian side: the Flemish dialects in the province of West Flanders (Bruges), the Brabant dialects spoken in East Flanders (Ghent) and in historical Brabant (Antwerp and Flemish Brabant), and the Limburg dialects, in the province of Limburg (Hasselt, Genk).
The term "Flemish", which generally refers to the various Dutch dialects spoken in Belgium, is therefore as erroneous as the term "Dutch" applied to all inhabitants of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
In the history of the Dutch language, Flemish and Brabant were the most prestigious dialects used by authors until the beginning of the 16th century. But the ruin and oppression of the Southern Netherlands during the religious wars of the sixteenth century led the majority of intellectuals to seek refuge in the less prosperous and less populated Holland. For the purposes of Bible translation, a standard language was created, mainly based on Brabant and Dutch, from which modern Dutch is derived. While the dialects of the Belgian provinces were splitting up and becoming corrupted by French influences, the Netherlands was building an original national culture, which is reflected in its present language.
When, in the 19th century, Flemish intellectuals set out to resurrect the culture of their people, they chose to turn to modern Dutch of the Netherlands, rather than to start from the fragmented dialects of their provinces. Today, Dutch-speaking Belgians are therefore torn between the dialect spoken at home, the official, somewhat archaic Dutch taught at school in Belgium, and the living Dutch of the Dutch people in which they do not really recognize themselves. As between the French of Belgium and the French of France, inevitable divergences sometimes provoke mutual misunderstandings and mockery. Just as the French often make fun of the Belgian accent, the Dutch have a field day with the Flemish... And vice versa !
The three regional Romance languages
Few French people know it, but there are actually three Romance languages in Belgium. Walloon, spoken in most of Wallonia, in three sub-regional variations, is the majority language (see box), Picard (in its Walloon-influenced form) in the western part of the province of Hainaut between Tournai and Mons, and Lorrain, spoken in the Gaume region around Virton, also influenced by Walloon.
Here again, the use of the terms "Wallonia" and "Walloon" - to designate the whole territory south of Brussels and its inhabitants - is abusive from a linguistic and ethnological point of view. Especially since the Walloon region includes the eastern cantons, inhabited by 73,000 German speakers, who only joined the Belgian state after 1918. Walloon is therefore a dialect spoken in Wallonia. It was still spoken by a significant part of the population until the 1930s, but because it is not taught, it is less and less used today. A good part of the population of Wallonia understands it however, at least a minimum.
