Straight Outta Fourons: Belgium’s Linguistic Madness

It is an old jibe in the UK, especially among Euroskeptics, that Belgium is not a real country. It was formed in response to complicated geopolitical exigencies in 1830, mashing together French-speaking Walloons with Catholic Dutch-speaking Flemings who wanted to secede from the Netherlands. The name comes from an ancient Roman province, itself named for a long-extinct Celtic tribe. The first king was a German prince chosen specifically because he would be neutral (both between the language communities and among the great powers), but it quickly became pretty obvious that French was the dominant language of the new state. But half his subjects refused to let Dutch go into the night. At every government attempt to make everyone learn the national language, Flanders was a linguistic porcupine. Flemings elected legislators whose chief concern was promotion of their language, until finally by the mid-20th Century Dutch achieved fully co-equal status with French. <a href="https://sjquillen.medium.com/straight-outta-fourons-belgiums-linguistic-insanity-5a7d3bce1966">Click Here</a>