Every six years since 2000, Brussels is blessed with the publication of a taalbarometer, which documents the region’s linguistic situation. The fifth one has just been published. It lays bare some striking trends and highlights some formidable challenges.
Philosopher Philippe Van Parijs reflects on current debates in Brussels, Belgium and Europe
Hundreds of languages
Take the Brussels metro. Listen to the conversations. However hard you try and however polyglot you are, most of them are likely to remain unintelligible to you. Is this not supposed to be a bilingual French-Dutch city? Yes, officially. And until about 50 years ago, this was largely the case. But no longer.
How many languages are spoken by Brussels residents today? No one can tell. Belgium’s latest linguistic census was held in 1947. It was scrapped due to Flemish fears that the Francophone “oil stain” would spread from Brussels into Flanders: as soon as the census results revealed that at least 30% of the local population spoke French at home, the municipality became officially bilingual and was expected, as had been the case in Brussels itself, to undergo an inexorable frenchification process.
Yet, we can get a good idea of Brussels’ current linguistic diversity. Since 2000, the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) has been publishing a Taalbarometer every 6 years, based on a representative sample of the Brussels population. The fifth one was published on 15 May. 104 different languages were mentioned by the 1627 respondents as languages they could speak correctly — compared to 72 in the 2000 Taalbarometer. But there are of course many more languages that did not find their way into this small sample.
For example, of India’s 22 official languages, six were mentioned by at least one respondent (Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, Urdu), but several of India’s 700 other languages are bound to be present among the 960.000 adult Brusselers not included in the sample. If you are ever asked how many languages Brusselers speak, “several hundred” will be a far better answer than “104”.
Arabic soon Brussels’ second mother tongue?
This increasing diversity is unavoidably associated with a steady decline of the proportion of Brusselers brought up in Dutch — the language in which Brussels was born 1000 years ago — or in French — the language in which it started becoming a capital 500 years ago. Between 2000 and 2024, the percentage of 'pure Francophones', i.e. those with French as their sole native language, fell from 51.8% to 41.3%, whereas those with only Dutch as their native language dropped from 9.3% to 7.5%.
French and Dutch, however, are sometimes combined with one another as home languages, and often with other languages. If these combinations are taken into account, the percentage of French native speakers fell from 71 to 63.6% between 2000 and 2024, and that of Dutch native speakers from 19.3 to 11.8%. Over the same period, the percentage of native speakers of Arabic, Brussels’ third native language, grew from slightly below 10% to slightly above 11%. Arabic, mostly in the Darija version spoken in Morocco, is on its way to overtaking Dutch as Brussels’ second native language.
150.000 Brusselers unable to speak French or Dutch
Fortunately for mutual understanding, the languages Brusselers know are not only those inherited from their parents. When adding to native speakers respondents who learned French and Dutch later in life, we obtain percentages that are significantly higher, but these are in even sharper decline. Between 2000 and 2024, the percentage of Brusselers who say they can speak French well — that is, more than get by (se débrouiller) — dropped from 95.5% to 81.0%, while the percentage of those who say they can speak Dutch correctly dropped from 33.3% to 22.3%.
As a corollary, the percentage of respondents who said they could speak well neither French nor Dutch rose spectacularly from 4.0 to 15.4%. Given that Brussels’ total population has grown by close to 30% since 2000, the number of Brussels adult residents unable to speak either of Brussels’ two official languages can be estimated to have risen from about 30.000 to about 150.000. This constitutes a major problem for public services which, according to the 1966 legislation still in force today, can only be offered in French and Dutch.
Make English an official language ?
Would it help to add English to French and Dutch as a third official language? English is the native language of only a tiny proportion of the population. Yet, the 2000 Taalbarometer showed that it was close to overtaking Dutch in terms of how many respondents regarded themselves as speaking it well. Whereas competence in both French and Dutch has kept shrinking since then, competence in English managed to rise from 33.% to 34.4% by 2017. Seven years later, the latest Taalbarometer has revealed a sharp rise to 46.7%.
The strengthening of the position of English as Brussels’ second language leads to some surprising new practices. For example, when Dutch-speaking Taalbarometer respondents are asked how they react when a public employee addresses them in French, 3.5% of them reply that they switch to English. And no less than 13% of French-speaking respondents reply that they also do so when a public employee addresses them in Dutch. This is one of the many modest ways in which English already functions de facto as an official language.
Legalizing and upscaling the provision of public services in English would be a useful step forward. But it would only deal with one third of the problem. According to the Taalbarometer, the percentage of adult Brusselers who speak well neither French, Dutch, nor English increased from 3 to 10.5% between 2000 and 2024. This means that adding English would only shrink the number of adult Brussels residents unable to access public services in a language they speak well from about 150.000 to 100.000.
A more radical reform is therefore needed. The “right to be served in one’s native language” is irreversibly out of reach. But it can be better achieved by making efficient and uninhibited use of the existing linguistic competences of public employees. This too is already happening. Thus, Taalbarometer respondents mention no less than 33 languages other than French and Dutch that they have used with staff in Brussel hospitals. In combination with advanced translation technologies, legalizing and generalizing such practices would significantly reduce misunderstandings, delays, and failures to access important information and services for a large proportion of Brussels’ linguistically hyper-diverse population
Linguistic diversity without multilingualism is a calamity
Providing multilingual public services does not make it any less necessary to make Brussels citizens more multilingual. Competence in French, Dutch and English matters for smooth access to public services. It is also a major asset on the job market in Brussels and its periphery, a condition for full political participation in Belgium’s and Europe’s capital and a contribution to its social cohesion.
Competence in other languages matters too. A solid knowledge of the native language, whatever it is, far from being a hindrance, creates the best foundation for the learning of the school language and for any subsequent cognitive development. It also enables people to maintain strong bonds with those who share the same language, nearby and far away, and with the regions of the world where it is spoken. Moreover, publicly showing respect and appreciation for these languages and the associated identities is necessary in order to make everyone in Brussels, whatever their origin, feel full members of Brussels’ political community, of the “people” of Brussels.
“Brussels is the city with the highest concentration of people speaking different languages and a population that has learned to respect, learn and spread bilingualism as a common practice.” So said a report published in 2001 by the European Commission under the title “Brussels, Capital of Europe”. It therefore recommended the creation of an “Institute for multilingualism”. Brussels does not have such an institute, and perhaps does not need one. What it has had in the present legislature — and will hopefully keep in the next one — is a minister for the promotion of multilingualism and, at his initiative, a Brussels Council for Multilingualism.
In its memorandum for the 2024 elections, the Council makes many recommendations. One of them is the launch of an annual, largely bottom up “Brussels Multilingualism Week”. This would provide an opportunity to celebrate Brussels’ exceptional linguistic diversity, but also to emphasize that linguistic diversity without generalized multilingualism is a calamity. It must therefore mobilize experts and role models, businesses and administrations, schools and libraries, welfare offices and hospitals in order to show how important it is, in Brussels even more than elsewhere, to learn languages — and how easy and cheap it can be if one knows how best to do so and where one can find help.
Every day in every Brusseler’s life can and must be used to improve one of their languages and to help others to improve theirs. If Brussels is not to become a Babel incapacitated by its linguistic diversity, it must be more than ever an enthusiastic, bubbling, sparkling hotbed for multilingualism.
