ABSTRACT
Belgium is officially a trilingual country (Dutch, French and German are recognised). It has three communities, the German-speaking, the French-speaking and the Dutch-speaking. It has three regions, the Walloon region, the Flemish region and the region of Brussels Capital, and it has no fewer than seven governments. These are in random order (1) the federal one, (2) the government of the German-speaking community, (3) the government of the French-speaking community, (4) the government of the Flemish community, (5) the government of the Walloon region, (6) the Brussels government and (7) the Council of the region of Brussels Capital. Given the fact that the area of Belgium is about 30000 sq. km, there is one government per 4.286 sq. km. I believe this to be a world record! The French-speaking and the Dutch-speaking regions have adopted the principle of linguistic territoriality, i.e. French and Dutch are the sole official languages in these official monolingual regions. The German-speaking region is bilingual (German–French), as is the Brussels region (French–Dutch). This situation means that in the bilingual areas, one would expect societal multilingualism to coincide with individual plurilingualism. Societal multilingualism is defined as occuring in societies legally accepting two or more languages, while individual plurilingualism refers to the actual knowledge of these languages by its citizens.
