Belgium, a trilingual country

Belgium is a small country compared to Spain, yet it has 3 distinct languages of its own. You’ll find speakers of Dutch, the mother tongue of over 60% of the total population;German spoken by a community of just over 1%; and French spoken by 39% of the inhabitants (not to mention a mixture of several dialects), all coexisting in a not so large territory. It is surprising how, when I move from one region to another, within a matter of a few kilometres they speak a different language.

This has led to administrative, political and economic power differences between the regions. The clashes between the two communities have not yet been resolved, nor have the differences been healed, nor is the future development of the coexistence of the two languages clear. On the positive side, however, is the ability of the inhabitants to speak more than one language. They master their own language and at least one other language perfectly.

I consider this to be an advantage that other countries do not have. Spain, for example, has Spanish as its official language, although in some communities there are co-official languages such as Basque, Galician and Catalan. But these languages do not have the same weight as English or French, languages that I think the majority of inhabitants master.

Something that really caught my attention was how a person who lived on the street with no economic resources or education could speak to me in three different languages in his native language, whether it was a question of survival or not, but in Spain they wouldn’t know how to speak to you in another language so easily.

From my point of view, as there has been so much immigration and immigration, the country has been adapting and with it its inhabitants. That’s why its people make a good impression on me, if you don’t know how to master their language, they automatically speak to you in another language so that you understand it, and that doesn’t happen everywhere.