ABSTRACT
An American sociologist who undertakes a study of the relations between the two language communities of Belgium can hardly avoid a continual feeling of deja vu. Despite the minor dispute in Brussels and its environs, the effort to establish Dutch as an official language of Belgium, on a full par with French, was completed. The complexities of the Dutch terminology were compounded when the various designations were translated into other languages. In one or two generations the Flemish have risen from an economically and culturally subordinate status to parity with francophone Belgians. The world's subnations, generally the end products of one or another assortative process, sometimes retain a vestigial association with their homeland, even when there has been no contact for centuries. It would not be possible to sum up in a few lines so complex and polemical a subject as the achievements and limitations of the African American movement.
