Van Parijs, Philippe
[UCL]
Language wars lie at the heart of Belgian history. Through a succession of bitter
battles, endless power struggles and laborious compromises, Belgium’s political
leaders gradually managed to elaborate, adjust and readjust a legal framework likely
to facilitate a fairly peaceful cohabitation of the populations and a reasonably effective
functioning of the institutions. But while squabbles are still going on about the
survival of linguistic “facilities” in a number of Flemish communes or about how
fluent Brussels firemen need to be in Dutch, the linguistic
landscapes of Europe, Belgium and Brussels are undergoing unprecedented transformation
which it is high time for us to appreciate.
Bibliographic reference |
Van Parijs, Philippe. Brussels Capital of Europe: the new linguistic challenges. In: Brussels Studies, Vol. 6, p. 1-10 (mai 2007) |
Permanent URL |
http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/96998 |