hey guys welcome back to foreign reacts today we're gonna be checking out a video
that was suggested how brussels belgium operates a trilingual city that is interesting trilingual
three languages if i'm not an idiot and i'm saying that correctly uh trilingual three
different languages in a city i hope but um yeah should be really interesting but we're gonna check
this video out so um yeah i'm moving to finland check the link in the comment section don't want
to miss it trust me you don't want to miss it can't repeat it enough click the link in the
comment section down below that's going to be the channel regarding me moving to finland once i'm
in finland i'm not going to just be in finland i'm going to be in europe and y'all know how europe is
europe is not like america even though america is kind of similar to europe in terms of you
can travel to other states but yeah i'm not going to hold you i'm going to be all over the
europe man i'm going to do my thing because i need to visit other places because you know foreign ex
exposed me to that i don't know what's wrong with my brain today i just can't
talk either ways guys we're gonna get right into the video and let this woman speak because i just
i'm not i'm not really with the talking right now for some reason i just can't you know get
my words out there but either ways we're gonna get right in this video uh welcome to foreign reaction
foreign reaction here and um yeah let's get right into the videos imagine the nearest city to you
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 businesses would talk to
its customers and its employees in that language right you get the idea so now
imagine yourself in a city where more people speak a foreign language than the native one
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
called brussels belgium belgium has more than one official language but that's not what's unusual
here over a hundred countries actually have more than one official language in belgium there are
three official languages split across four regions so you've got french in the southern region
of wallonia then you've got dutch which you'll sometimes hear me referring to as flanish that
basically means the dialects of dutch that are spoken in this northern region of belgium
called flanders then you've got german which is spoken just in the southern communities which
became part of belgium in 1919 as reparations for world war one and finally this is the capital
region of brussels it's the only bilingual region of the country and hear french and duchess spoken
so here we've got a capital city operating in two languages and then just to shake things up a
little bit more let's throw in a load of european expats who have moved to the city to work at
the european commission european parliament and a lot of these expats are gonna communicate
with each other in english but what we want to understand though is how and why does this city
operate in three languages and more importantly what does it feel like to move around the city so
to do that we've got to go back and understand how belgium came to be belgium was officially founded
the year after the 1830 belgian revolution so this land had been passed between different powers and
states for centuries it was part of spain then it was under the austrian 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 mainly to the same states in power i thought she was going to literally
say the united kingdom because i was like wait but what i could be sure i learned in other videos it
was the netherlands but yeah united kingdom of the netherlands already a geographical
linguistic divide in 1830 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 ground rules to get over this pesky linguistic divide so they write up their
constitution it says that the use of languages current in belgium is optional only the law
can rule on this matter and only for acts of the public authorities and for legal matters
and this is what belgium is going to hinge its approach to language on for the next two centuries
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 they're french-speaking so what you essentially
have is a minority french-speaking population ruling over a majority flemish-speaking population
the flemish did not like that so fast forward to 1932 belgium thinks hang on maybe let's base
our language of administration off of something called the principle of territoriality so this
means that each of the four territories in belgium are going to have their own
regional governments and that government is going to be run in the language of the territory finally
flanders are going to have a taste of that sweet legal autonomy that they've been after
so let's look for a second at this principle of territoriality territories officially became part
of the constitution in 1970 and the freedom of language i actually did not know that it
was actually four territories i did not know brussels was actually a territory it isn't isn't
isn't brussels considered one of the fourth because according to what she's talking about
i really thought that it was a flemish the dutch section the german section and you know the french
i thought that was really what it was but i never knew that brussels was actually i don't
i think brussels is a capital right but i didn't know i hope i'm not saying garbage because i'm
kind of i don't know messed up today not thinking straight but yeah right still held true but now
the official language of the territory had to be used for public authority and the 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 documents that
companies have to use it even goes as far as that the government is not legally obliged
to communicate with you in any language other than the language of their territory
in brussels i would sometimes have to go with my boyfriend his meetings about his residency
because the government worker that he got on the day might just decide that they didn't want to or
they weren't able to speak to him in english and i would need to translate into french this
office 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 the 2nd of march this year
so what about english in brussels european council and commission started to host meetings and open
offices in the city in the 50s and 60s and since then the international presence in
little old brussels has grown when you have one city hosting major european institutions
like the european commission parliament council and other international ones like nato then other
organizations are going to want to set up a branch in that city too and with the jobs created come
foreign expats so in 2020 50 of brussels residents were foreign or were born with a nationality that
wasn't belgian so english is regularly used as a lingua franca if two people don't share the
same native language then very often in brussels english will be used as the language of choice
to communicate in even at work actually a study in 2006 showed more brussels residents identifying
themselves as having good to excellent levels of english than they did flemish that means there
are more people in the capital city that speak a foreign language than one of the official ones
isn't language fun i know it's a lot to take in but now we know about the history of language
in the city let's look at what it's like to be there we're going to take a hypothetical stroll
down the brussels streets we're just gonna see what it would look like to spend a day in brussels
taking the stroll down the brussels streets maybe i'm going to drop off my hypothetical
child at school this child doesn't exist it's a hypothetical day the first thing
we're going to notice is that all of the street signs are bilingual
we're going in two months i'm going to drop off my hypothetical child at school what language
are they going to be taught in well it could be french or it could be flemish but it's not going
to be both so now it's just me i'm going to stop for a little coughing that's supposed to be really
tough like imagine the kid is learning and you know they just switch them up like bro you gotta
learn from french or blemish man nothing nothing specific whoa that would have been
tough what language do i order in the barista could be flemish or they could be francophone
but we're in the center so let's be honest i could probably order in english
let's say that i need to hop on a train to go to ghent in the flemish speaking
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's going to be displayed in french and in flemish
i make my way down to the platform i hop on my train maybe i want to kill the time by doing a
little reading maybe i'm going to pick up the paper well i'm going to have to make a
choice between a french paper or a flemish paper because language divides people have we learned
nothing so far and there's an english paper too like i just showed you a headline from it
but i've got to stay alert on the train can't relax too much because the terrain tunnel
changes language depending on what region the train's in
this is this beautiful multilingual hypothetical day draws to a close
i'm gonna end the day by going to my favorite book shop
bookshops and hustles are amazing 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 there's actually a branch of a british chain of bookshops in the city of brussels it's
called waterstones i definitely i definitely for me i'm like i'm really pleased with finland like
i just gotta learn one language like i'm not throwing shades at brussels or um belgium no
that's beautiful that they have what they have but i'm happy and finland it's it the language is
hard it's hard it's really hard to learn it but hey once i learned it man i'm good i ain't gonna
worry about nothing else you know what i'm trying to say so yeah complicated i must say but um yeah
ah imagine that you're on the middle of a train ride and they just switch language
i swear to you you step inside and you would not know that you're in brussels
so how does brussels operate as a trilingual city arguably it doesn't belgium as we've seen has this
history of letting people you know do their thing we've got this principle of freedom of language
but in order to adhere to that we're going to split things up and divide them and make them
more complicated it's so confusing all in all i think that brussels is a fascinating example
of how a country's history and their recent modern history come together and they build and they
shape an attitude towards language that we can see the very real consequences of today so thanks for
watching and learning about this language story with me if you want to learn more about travelling
smarter then i think was complicated i would have never guessed that bro i would have never guessed
that are there any even even other countries in this world that actually does that like
well jim y'all be doing some crazy thing over there that's i'm actually shocked
wow oh my goodness wow
wow the french and the flemish man like flemish flemish flemish the dutch it's crazy
that was very complicated man not really complicated how she explained it but
the complexity of that man whoa just imagine walking down the street and process
and you don't know either the dutch or the um the french nice tough anyways guys i gotta get
out of here man so like and subscribe i'm stressed this got me stressed out peace