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The Kingdom of Belgium has three official languages: Dutch, French, and German . A number of non-official, minority languages and dialects are spoken as well. As a result of being in between Latin and Germanic Europe, and historically being split between different principalities, the nation has multiple official languages.
Belgium is a federal state comprising three communities and three regions that are based on four language areas. For each of these subdivision types, the subdivisions together make up the entire country; in other words, the types overlap. The language areas were established by the Second Gilson Act, which entered into force on 2 August 1963.
Belgium is a constitutional, popular monarchy and a federal parliamentary democracy. The bicameral federal parliament is composed of a Senate and a Chamber of Representatives. The former is made up of 50 senators appointed by the parliaments of the communities and regions and 10 co-opted senators.
Linguistic map of Belgium. Officially Francophone areas in red.. Belgian French (French: français de Belgique) is the variety of French spoken mainly among the French Community of Belgium, alongside related Oïl languages of the region such as Walloon, Picard, Champenois, and Lorrain (Gaumais).
A factor in the Belgian Revolution of the 1830s was the rising dominance of the Dutch language in the southern provinces of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. [1] A conflict arose between the citizenry of the Flemish provinces who wished to engage with the authorities in Dutch, and the largely francophone aristocracy of the southern provinces which became modern-day Belgium.
The primary language of the community is German, making this one of the three official languages in Belgium. Traditionally the community and the wider area around it forms an intersection of various local languages and/or dialects, namely Limburgish, Ripuarian and Moselle Franconian varieties. The community population numbers around 79,000 (as ...
On August 2, 1963, the second Gilson Act entered into force, fixing the division of Belgium into four language areas: a Dutch, a French and a German language area, with Brussels as a bilingual area. In 1970, there was a first state reform, which resulted in the establishment of three cultural communities: Dutch, French and German.
Belgium's three official languages are Dutch, spoken by about 60% of the population, French, spoken by about 40%, and German, spoken by less than 1%. The vast majority of Belgium's population, 99%, is literate as defined by the Belgian government, i.e. capable of reading and writing in an official language by the time a citizen has reached the ...