Trudeau’s mother was Anglo-Scottish. She belonged to the dominant language group. Why did she marry into a minority-language family and produce children whose main language was French?

Above, you said that my “Irish example is ridiculous. Flemish is spoken by a majority of the country, and Brussels is surrounded by Flemish speakers. Flemish is not an isolated island under siege, like Irish.” English was spoken by a majority of Canadians, probably from the 1840s at the latest, and English has traditionally enjoyed higher prestige than French, but even in those situations, people transferred from the Anglophone communities to the Francophone one, most frequently because they belonged to relatively isolated language minorities. The example of the Anglophones of Québec City is instructive.

If, for whatever insane reason, the Canadian government sought to bring back the proportion of Anglophones back to the level of 1921 throughy coercive language legislation, Bad Things would happen to Quebec City, not least because that goal would be impossible without massive population shifts. Similarly, if the Flemish government managed to take control of Brussels and impose a coercive language policy, mandating Dutch-language education for anyone not of “indigenous” stock and requiring bilingualism, Bad Things would happen to Brussels, not least because Brussels’ population structure is such that it can’t be as bilingual as Flanders.

What are you talking about with Richardson? He speaks English perfectly. What do you mean, “Spanish not English”. Richardson grew up mostly in the US, and I think would characterize English as his mother tongue. He just happens to speak Spanish extremely well and recognizes his Hispanic heritage.

Trudeau is more interesting, but he also speaks English fluently and got a fair amount of education in English as well.

He was born to an Anglophone father and held American citizenship in a continental-size area where the United States was clearly dominant. The United States was just a few hours away by plane, and American citizenship, to be frank, has more recognition than Nicaraguan! And yet, Spanish not English.

(You’re not commenting on Trudeau, I see. Good choice.)

The point I’m making, and have consistently been making, is that people shift languages more-or-less freely. It doesn’t matter if there are millions of speakers just on the other side of the border, not even if the language is the global lingua franca, if the language has fallen out of use in one’s town, or among one’s peers, or one’s family. The sort of coercive measures that you proposed above to boost Dutch-language fluency won’t work and have been proven not to work, and if they were somehow applied to Brussels would do a pretty good job of wrecking the city’s prospects. Not that they could be applied, in light of the city’s administrative separation from Flanders and the intense involvement of the international community in Brussels.

A Netherlandophone minority is likely to persist in Brussels, if only because of population exchange with Brussels’ hinterland in Flanders, but true Dutch-French bilingualism is likely impossible thanks to the choice and timing of the various language policies employed by Belgium and its constituent units for the past century and three-quarters.

I don’t think we are getting anywhere with this, so let’s just agree to disagree.

Bill Richardson’s family is somewhat complicated. His mother was a Mexican citizen. His father had an Anglo father and a Mexican mother and grew up in Nicaragua. I don’t understand what point you’re trying to make about assimiliation, because much of Bill Richardson’s family either was foreign or grew up in foreign countries.

1. A constitutive autonomy, this means that they can choose themselves how many MP’s and ‘Ministers’ they have in their own parliament and government.

2. A guaranteed representation in the federal parliament (Chambre and Senate).

3. A translation of all (or at least more) laws in German.

This community has also other wishes, but for these they have to deal with the region Wallonia, stipulates Karl-Heinz Lambertz, Ministerpräsident.

Today DG has already a lot of autonomy.

There is no important desire to split the country in the German speaking part of Belgium.

No, I don’t. I’m simply aware of the fact that language revival movements require a large number of speakers who enjoy a certain amount of prestige and territory and a state apparatus that’s capable of promoting the language with a minimum of conflict. In Quebec at the beginning of the Quiet Revolution, over 80% of the population spoke French as a preferred language; in Catalonia after Franco, something like 50% of the population spoke Catalan, but membership in the Catalanophone community has been notoriously permeable and Catalan was more prestigious than Spanish for the many Hispanophones in the working classes of Barcelona; even in Wales, the British state eventually conceded a whole array of Welsh-language cultural media and public institutions to a population of never less than a half-million people with its own Welsh-speaking heartland. In the Belgian region of Flanders, by all accounts the Dutch language has managed to return to a position that it deserves by virtue of its large number of speakers. The Dutch language in the Belgian region of Brussels is a different story.

“The foreigners are almost all French-speakers, so if they are subtracted, you in fact get a much higher percentage of Dutch speakers.”

I did. Let’s say that, of the one million people in Brussels, 150 000 (15%) are people who speak Dutch as their preferred language, and that the remaining 850 000 (85%) are people who speak French as their preferred language. Remove half of the French-preferring population (425 000 people) on the grounds of non-indigeneity and you’re left with 575 000 people. Calculating, it turns out that my original estimate was off—using these numbers, the Francophone majority of Brussels falls to a mere 74%.

The subtraction of these people is an arbitrary decision in any case, since, regardless of their degree of indigeneity, they’re going to be living permanently in Brussels in any case.

““How could a language that’s spoken by only a small minority of the Brussels population even as a second language be made mandatory without precipitating a mass exodus of Brussels’ population?” This isn’t a realistic statement of the current situation at all. Many Brusselois speak Dutch or Dutch dialects or have learned Dutch as a second language.”

Philippe Van Parijs, in his May 2007 Brussels Studies paper “Brussels Capital of Europe:
the new linguistic challenges”

http://www.brusselsstudies.be/PDF/EN_40_BS6EN.pdf

cites figures suggesting that 96% of Brussels’ population speaks French well or very well, versus 31% of Brussels’ population claiming the same for Dutch. This data is suggestive of many things, although it’s still worth noting that a smaller proportion of Brusselers speak Dutch than Flemish speak French. It doesn’t speak about the number of Brusselers who claim Dutch as their first language—further down, Van Parijs suggests that less than 10% of Brusselers can claim Dutch as their “only native language.” It certainly doesn’t constitute a definite statement as to whether people’s estimate of their fluency in Dutch (or, to be fair, French) is as high as they believe, or say anything about how often they use their language.

“The Irish example is ridiculous. Flemish is spoken by a majority of the country, and Brussels is surrounded by Flemish speakers. Flemish is not an isolated island under siege, like Irish.”

Leaving aside the reality that Brussels is embedded in a wider Brabant region where French/Dutch bilingualism is deeply entrenched and might still be shifting towards the French language thanks to suburban growth, it’s quite possible for pockets of a language’s speakers—even a dominant language—to be isolated amidst minority languages and eventually assimilated. The middle name of Pierre Trudeau was Elliott, and isn’t New Mexican Governor Richardson of Hispanic background?

My opinion on the Belgian language situation? There’s absolutely no reason to think that Flanders can’t succeed as a Netherlandophone society, but sadly, I’d not be much more likely to think that Belgian Francophones (not just in Wallonia but in Brussels) are going to learn Dutch in large numbers any time soon. Van Parijs’ suggestion that English might end up being the best common language for Belgians is a worthwhile idea and reminds me of reports from Switzerland. The language situation on the ground isn’t going to swing that much towards Dutch, though—Brussels is just too Francophone and too expansive. Frankly, I don’t envy Flanders—I can only imagine what language strife might be like in Canada if Montreal had been separated from Quebec province, made into the Canadian capital, Anglicized, and began to expand with speed into a Francophone hinterland.

I’m not necessarily in support of Flemish nationalism. I’m just against French-language supremacy, which you seem to suffer from.

The foreigners are almost all French-speakers, so if they are subtracted, you in fact get a much higher percentage of Dutch speakers.

“How could a language that’s spoken by only a small minority of the Brussels population even as a second language be made mandatory without precipitating a mass exodus of Brussels’ population?” This isn’t a realistic statement of the current situation at all. Many Brusselois speak Dutch or Dutch dialects or have learned Dutch as a second language.

The Irish example is ridiculous. Flemish is spoken by a majority of the country, and Brussels is surrounded by Flemish speakers. Flemish is not an isolated island under siege, like Irish.

Well then, there’s your problem. If the minority are so opposed to learning the majority’s language, they can hardly complain if the majority don’t want to live in the same country as them.

“Brussels is not demographically stable. It’s full of immigrants and non-Belgians.”

How many? Half, perhaps? If you arbitrarily subtract this foreign proportion from the mix, you get a resident Brussels population that is … five-sixths Francophone.

“If for example, you passed a law that required everyone that was not from Belgium originally to go to school in Flemish[.]”

Question: How would this be accomplished?

1. As I understand it, the Flemish Community’s power in Brussels is limited to the establishment of cultural institutions for people who identify with the Netherlandophone minority, one way or another. The Community’s poweers are powers of attraction, not compulsion. Have I misunderstood?

2. How can an overwhelmingly Francophone electorate in Brussels be convinced to favour such a radical transformation of education and their whole system of government?

“I’m not necessarily endorsing such a move, but it did work in Montreal and continues to work in Montreal, despite the overwhelming influence of English.”

It did work in Montréal, but that’s because there was a very large Francophone population already resident in Montréal. As I’ve pointed out above, at no point in the 20th century have Francophones not formed an absolute majority of the population of the city of Montréal. People of Italian, Haitian, Lebanese, Greek, or Indian descent, among other ethnicities, live in an integrated city where the Francophone presence has never been absent. Again, compare this to Brussels, where Netherlandophones have lacked such a majority for a century.

If, somehow, a Flemish government managed to take full control of Brussels and imposed mandatory Netherlandicization, it would wreak serious havoc. The language laws “worked” in Montréal at the expense of driving away well over a hundred thousand people in the four years between the 1976 election of the Parti Québécois and the 1980 referendum, not to mention most of the corporate headquarters which had once maintained their pan-Canadian headquarters there. (They probably could have been fine-tuned.) Montréal recovered, though not after some grey years, and not without losing its former status as the Canadian centre for business and finance.

How could anything better possibly be predicted for Brussels? Never mind the constitutuional changes that would have to be made to forcibly integrate Brussels into Flanders, likely against the will of Brussels’ inhabitants (if Flanders is unwilling to cede the language-facility communes on its border to Brussels, I can only imagine how Brusselers would react to talk of their city’s legal annexation). How could a language that’s spoken by only a small minority of the Brussels population even as a second language be made mandatory without precipitating a mass exodus of Brussels’ population? If you want a depopulated Brussels, that’s your right, but it’s not a vision that you should expect Brusselers to endorse.

“Language change is more complicated than you think.”

Your sympathy for Flemish nationalism has overtaken your reason. Let’s turn to another example, the Republic of Ireland, where despite decades of fairly strict legislation in favour of Irish the proportion of people whose main language is Irish has shrunk from 10% at independence to less than 3% now. Even there, a state administration that tried deseprately to revive Irish as a common vernacular failed in the face of the fact that the overwhelming majority of Ireland’s population—especially Ireland’s urban population—was already Anglophone.

If Belgian politics were different, I could imagine alternative situations—a policy of pan-Belgian bilingualism equivalent to Canadian bilingualism, saay.

“I also think that you are ignoring the death of the local Brussel dialects of Flemish, that are also being killed by French. In that sense, the cutting off of traditions is ongoing.”

I’m not ignoring it; I just think it’s inevitable. Without the partial compensation provided by migration, the French Canadian minorities outside of Québec and the adjacent bilingual belt would be shrinking quite rapidly, with rates of language shift per generation amounting to 50% or even more in some western provinces. The same phenomenon is present in other areas where isolated language minorities are mixed among larger populations—the Gaeltacht of the Republic of Ireland has consistently been shrinking since independence, for instance, despite Ireland’s language policy.