The Kingdom of Belgium, you must have read somewhere, is a federal
state that consist of two big monolingual regions and a tiny bilingual
one. Is that so? Not quite.
True, Dutch is the sole official language of Flanders, with the
exception of “facilities” for French speakers in a handful of communes,
mostly around Brussels. True too, French is the sole official language
of Wallonia, with the exception of a handful of communes near the German
border, where German is the official language. What about the third region, small but densely populated — over 10% of
Belgium’s population on 0.5% of its surface — the Region of
Brussels-Capital? It has two official languages on an equal footing,
Dutch and French. This means that all official documents must be
published in both languages, that both languages can be spoken in the
parliament of the Brussels Region and in the councils of its nineteen
municipalities, and that all publicly funded schools must use either
Dutch or French as the medium of instruction. Ever since the language border settled in the early Middle Ages, the
bulk of the population of Brussels and its surroundings spoke Brabants, a
version of Dutch (or Flemish, which is a variety of Dutch in about the
same linguistic sense as American is a variety of English). From the
moment the Dukes of Burgundy made Brussels their capital in the 15
th century, however, the dominant language in a slowly growing elite was French. In 1830, the Kingdom of Belgium was founded, like the French Republic
at the end of the previous century, as an officially monolingual
French-speaking state. It is only in 1898 that Dutch, spoken in some
version by the majority of the population, was recognized as co-official
at the level of the country, without this challenging the position of
French in the capital as the dominant language in politics, education
and administration. From generation to generation, especially after the introduction of
compulsory schooling, native speakers of Dutch living in Brussels first
acquired French as the language of social mobility, typically by
attending a French-medium school, which made them bilingual. And it the
next generation, Dutch got lost as a result of people educated in French
deciding not to transmit their native Dutch to their children, since
French was anyway sufficient to get along in a Brussels environment
increasingly dominated by it. This explains why Dutch-French bilinguals formed a strong relative
majority at close to 50% for nearly three quarters of a century, from
the end of the 19
th century to after World War II. [see
Figure 1]. This is the period in which Brussels could be called
bilingual in the pretty strong sense that half its population could
speak both Dutch and French, a proportion that is now down to about 20%.
Firstly, for the first time in recorded history, the proportion of
Brusselers who know Dutch and no French is slowly increasing. This may
be due in part to the growing presence of citizens from the Netherlands,
but also to the decline in the knowledge of French by young people
arriving from Flanders. Secondly, the proportion of people who know French and no Dutch has
seen its century-long steady progress halted. This has not happened
because of more Francophone Brusselers now learning Dutch (even though
there is some indication that this is happening too): the proportion of
bilinguals French-Dutch keeps falling, indeed more quickly in ten years
than in the previous fifty. The main cause is rather to be found in the third and most striking new
development: the fast swelling of a category that was insignificant
throughout most of Brussels’s recorded linguistic history and now
corresponds to 10% of the total: those who know neither Dutch nor French
(beyond a rudimentary level), most of whom (8%), it turns out, know no
English either. What does all this lead to today? Let us first look, for each of
Brussels’ main languages, at the proportion of adults who have it as
their native language or one of their native languages (i.e. spoken at
home as a child) [in blue in Figure 2]. French is clearly the dominant
language, with two thirds of the Brusselers mentioning it as a native
language. This is far more than the 21% for Arabic, which has now
overtaken Dutch (20%) as Brussels’ second native language. As we turn from native language to linguistic competence [in green in
Figure 2], French, as should be expected, becomes even more dominant,
with 89% claiming to know French well or very well. Despite being less
often mentioned as a native language than Arabic, Dutch (with 23%) leaps
ahead of Arabic (18%) in terms of competence. Contrary to all other languages, there are less adults claiming
competence in Arabic than adults who spoke some Arabic at home when they
were children. Arabic is not taught at school, and many families of
Moroccan origin (close to 20% of the Brussels population) switch
entirely to French. Unsurprisingly, however, the most spectacular difference between native
language and competence concerns English. With 30% of competent
speakers, it has clearly become Brussels’ second language. It is,
however, noteworthy, that the proportion of competent speakers in all
three of Brussels’ top languages has gone down in 2011 relative to five
years earlier: from 96 to 89% for French, from 35 to 30% for English and
from 28 to 23% for Dutch. The proportion of people competent in none of
these three languages, by contrast, rose over the same period from 2.5
to 8%. To sum up. Brussels is officially bilingual French-Dutch, but the
proportion of its population that claims to speak both languages is now
down to 20% and still declining. Especially in the last half century,
Brussels has become increasingly multilingual in terms of both native
language and competence. Further, Brussels is a “francophone” city in the sense that two thirds
of its population grew up with French present in the home context,
albeit in half the cases in combination with another language. But it is
definitely no longer on a path that would take it from a situation in
which the bulk of the population had Dutch only as its sole mother
tongue to one in which it will have French as its sole mother tongue.
Brussels can also be called a “francophone” city in the sense that close
to 90% of its population can speak it well or very well. But this
proportion has recently started to decline, and in some environments it
now faces competition with English as Brussels’ lingua franca.
The Brussels Times (Graphs) Photo
