Belgian Language Issues

[Steve]

...Delval, a French speaker from the country's south married to a Dutch speaker from the north, long ago grew accustomed to relying on his wife to fill out the strictly Dutch-only paperwork from the local mayor's office. Like many people raised in Wallonia, the country's French-speaking region, Delval's Dutch is at best rudimentary, a relic of weekly classes in school.

 

But in recent months, the linguistic obstacles have accumulated beyond the merely niggling. New regulations stipulate that public land in Delval's municipality can be sold only to people who speak Dutch or demonstrate a willingness to learn it. Teachers in his granddaughter's kindergarten are now forbidden to speak French on school premises. And one recent night, Delval said, police failed to respond to his French-language call asking them to investigate a strange noise outside his front door.

 

"I am a Belgian above all," said the 58-year-old retiree, who jokes that pretty soon passports will be needed to pass across the country's linguistic fault lines. "But I'm fed up with the state of this country."

 

Delval's frustration grows from a new flare-up of old tensions in this country, where French- and Dutch-speaking populations were thrown together by border redrawings after the Napoleonic wars...

 

 

I was always under the impression that Belgians spoke at least 2 languages French, Flemish) and sometimes 3 (German) or more (English). I have a Belgian friend who speaks all those plus spanish and italian.

 

I was under the impression that a lot of Swiss speak any combination of at least 2 languages (French, German and Italian in the south near the Alps)

[Lusty]

My Grandad could speak:English,French,Portuguese,Spanish and Italian.

My Grandma could speak:English,French,Flemish(A sort of Dutch)and some Spanish.

When we used to go around there visiting and they decided to have a domestic which was quite often they use to argue in some sort of hybrid language