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How Brussels, Belgium Operates as a Trilingual City
Mar 27, 2025
You might know Brussels as the capital of Belgium, or the home of many European institutions… but did you know it has two official languages that the region needs to operate in? Or that more residents actually speak a third unofficial language than one of the official ones?
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Imagine the nearest city to you
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Now most of the time the city is going to operate in one language. So local government will talk to its people in that language
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businesses will talk to its customers and its employees in that language
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You get the idea. So now imagine yourself in a city where more people speak a foreign language than the native one
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Welcome to Brussels. I'm Emily with Bright Trip and today I'm going to tell you about a little city in a little country
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called Brussels, Belgium. Belgium has more than one official language but that's not what's
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unusual here. Over 100 countries actually have more than one official language. In Belgium there
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are three official languages split across four regions. So you've got French in the southern
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region of Wallonia. Then you've got Dutch, which you'll sometimes hear me referring to as Flemish
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That basically means the dialects of Dutch that are spoken in this northern region of Belgium
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called Flanders. Then you've got German, which is spoken just in these southern communities
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which became part of Belgium in 1919 as reparations for World War One. And finally
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this is the capital region of Brussels. It's the only bilingual region of the country and here
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French and Dutch has spoken. So here we've got a capital city operating in two languages and then
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just to shake things up a little bit more let's throw in a load of European expats who have moved
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to the city to work at the European Commission, European Parliament and a lot of these expats are
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gonna communicate with each other in English. But what we want to understand though is how and why
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does this city operate in three languages and more importantly what does it feel like to move around
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the city so to do that we've got to go back and understand how Belgium came to be Belgium was
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officially founded the year after the 1830 Belgian revolution so this land had been passed between
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different powers and states for centuries it was part of Spain then it was under the Austrian
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Habsburg monarchy it was part of France and then most recently it was part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands Even though this land had been passed mainly to the same states and powers there was already a geographical linguistic divide in 1830
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Generally speaking, the southern population was French-speaking, and the northern population was Flemish-speaking. But now that Belgium was its own country, it needed to lay down some
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ground rules to get over this pesky linguistic divide. So they write up their constitution
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It says that the use of languages current in Belgium is optional
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Only the law can rule on this matter and only for acts of the public authorities and for legal matters
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And this is what Belgium is going to hinge its approach to language on for the next two centuries
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But what happens right off the bat is that the people in power, the ones working in the courts or running the government, don't speak Flemish
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They're French speaking. so what you essentially have is a minority french-speaking population ruling over a majority
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flemish-speaking population the flemish did not like that so fast forward to 1932 belgium thinks
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hang on maybe let's base our language of administration off of something called the
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principle of territoriality so this means that each of the four territories in belgium are going
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to have their own regional governments and that government is going to be run in the language of
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the territory. Finally, Flanders are going to have a taste of that sweet legal autonomy that they've
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been after. So let's look for a second at this principle of territoriality. These four territories
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officially became part of the constitution in 1970 and the freedom of language still held true
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but now the official language of the territory had to be used for public authority and the
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administration, court cases, education in institutions that are established, recognized or funded by the government, the relations between employers and their employees, and the official
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documents that companies have to use. It even goes as far as that the government is not legally
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obliged to communicate with you in any language other than the language of their territory
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in brussels i would sometimes have to go with my boyfriend to his meetings about his residency
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because the government worker that he got on the day might just decide that they didn't want to or
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they weren't able to speak to him in english and i would need to translate into french this office
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would have seen expats every single day a lot of them maybe not being able to speak french or flemish but this principle actually even causes a lot of controversy even between the local population This is a headline from
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the 2nd of March this year. So what about English in Brussels? The European Council and Commission
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started to host meetings and open offices in the city in the 50s and 60s and since then the
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international presence in little old Brussels has grown. When you have one city hosting major
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European institutions like the European Commission, Parliament, Council and other international ones
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like NATO, then other organizations are going to want to set up a branch in that city too
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And with the jobs created come foreign expats. So in 2020, 50% of Brussels residents were foreign
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or were born with a nationality that wasn't Belgian. So English is regularly used as a lingua franca
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If two people don't share the same native language then very often in Brussels English
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will be used as the language of choice to communicate in, even at work. Actually a study
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in 2006 showed more Brussels residents identifying themselves as having good to excellent levels of
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English than they did Flemish. That means there are more people in the capital city that speak
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a foreign language than one of the official ones. Isn't language fun? I know it's a lot to take in
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but now we know about the history of language in the city, let's look at what it's like to be there
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We're going to take a hypothetical stroll down the Brussels streets. We're just going to see
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what it would look like to spend a day in Brussels. Taking a stroll down the Brussels streets. Maybe
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I am going to drop off my hypothetical child at school. This child doesn't exist. It's a
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hypothetical day. The first thing we're going to notice is that all of the street signs are bilingual
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So I'm going to drop off my hypothetical child at school. What language are they going to be taught
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in? Well, it could be French or it could be Flemish, but it's not going to be both
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So now it's just me. I'm going to stop for a little coffee. What language do I order in
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The barista could be Flemish or they could be Francophone, but we're in the centre so let's be honest, I could probably order in English
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Let say that I need to hop on a train to go to Ghent in the Flemish region for the day I need to get a train So I wander into the train station looking up the train information on the board Everything going to be displayed in French and in Flemish
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I make my way down to the platform. I hop on my train. Maybe I want to kill the time by doing a
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little reading. Maybe I'm going to pick up the paper. Well, I'm going to have to make a choice
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between a French paper or a Flemish paper because language divides people. Have we learned nothing
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so far and there's an english paper too like i just showed you a headline from it
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but i've got to stay alert on the train can't relax too much because the train
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tannoy changes language depending on what region the train's in so as this beautiful multilingual hypothetical day draws to a close
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I'm going to end the day by going to my favourite bookshop. Bookshops in Brussels are amazing
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I found that most bookshops would have an international section. And even if they didn't, there are a lot of bookshops that are just marketed to the expats of the city
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There's actually a branch of a British chain of bookshops in the city of Brussels
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It's called Waterstones. And I swear to you, you step inside and you would not know that you're in Brussels
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so how does brussels operate as a trilingual city arguably it doesn't belgium as we've seen
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has this history of letting people you know do their thing we've got this principle of freedom
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of language but in order to adhere to that we're going to split things up and divide them
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and make them more complicated it's so confusing all in all i think that brussels is a fascinating
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example of how a country's history and their recent modern history come together and they
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build and they shape an attitude towards language that we can see the very real consequences of
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today so thanks for watching and learning about this language story with me if you want to learn
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more about traveling smarter then head over to brighttrip.com forward slash courses there are a
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ton of interesting courses there on travel and skill-based courses including this one on how to
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learn a foreign language i'm just realizing i never picked up my hypothetical child from school
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