Language Politics in Belgium

[ugly_boy]

Just read an interesting article in the International Herald Tribune: "Belgium teeters on a linguistic edge." It's a little long to post the full text, but it makes for an interesting read.

Liedekerke has only 12,000 inhabitants, but its elected council has caused a stir by insisting on the "Flemish nature" of the town. Not only must all city

Comments

[conuly]

By punishing the children?

[conuly]

Yeah, you know what? The children have no say in where they live, nor what language their parents speak at home. If you've just moved to an area, I think it's not unreasonable to have a few months to learn the language.

[bolboreta]

They do have "a few months" to learn the language, the Flemish government will do anything to help them learn Dutch. But asking them to learn the only official language of the place isn't such an unreasonable request either.

They're talking about extracurricular activities. I know I wouldn't want to be in charge of a group of children who don't understand me, but maybe I'm weird. The Flemish are pretty annoyed with the fact that some of the areas close to Brussels have been forced to have French speaking facilities because people (who work in Brussels) move there with no intention of ever learning their language. Theoretically, those facilities should eventually disappear (as their children learn Dutch and grow up), but the French speakers want them to stay, and the Flemish feel that they're being colonized.

[ein_wunderkind]

I think an independent Flemish state sounds nice personally :-)

[iriacynthe]

They're pushing things way too hard in my opinion, but I can understand where they're coming from. Flemish people have been struggling to be able to speak their own language in their own part of the country (it was only 40 years ago that the university of Leuven, a Flemish city, became actually Flemish). French used to be the language you had to speak to be someone, Flemish was spoken by the people on the street but was pretty much considered inferior. This happened before I was even born, but it's still a sensitive subject for a lot of people in Belgium nowadays. Brussels, which is situated in Flanders, is officially bilingual, but in reality the majority speaks French. And, as a Flemish person, in a lot of facilities in Brussels you can't be helped in Flemish because nobody in the store, restaurant, supermarket,... speaks it. Which is rather frustrating when you're visiting your own capitol. This situation has spread out trough a lot of Flemish villages like Liedekerke, some of these villages even have a mayor that only speaks

[germaniac_z]

And there goes Kosovo all over again.

[imluxionverdin]

...but children who cannot speak the language can be prohibited from taking part in holiday outings, like hikes and swimming classes.
I understand that if a child has newly arrived immigrant parents and speaks only some foreign language there might be difficulties with the teachers undesrstanding them.

But French is an official language of Belgium. Are we really saying it's right if parents who lived in Brussels say, and only speak French, moved into the area, their children would be prevented to participating in the school activites?

Isn't this like an area in Wales deciding that only Welsh speaking children can go on school trips, even if the child speaks fluent English?

[iriacynthe]

Nobody's talking about school trips. As far as I know, the discussion is entirely about holiday activities. These are very common in most Belgian villages, and are often guided by teenagers and young adults that either volunteer for these jobs, or that do this as a holiday job whil they still study themselves. They don't have any specific training to compensate the difficulties of having to deal with children that speak a different language, even when it's one of the official languages of the country.