User talk:Great floors

Hello, Great floors! Welcome to Wikivoyage.

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Thanks for your edits to the Brussels guide! I'm not sure I completely understand about the "native" population, though. Are you excluding foreign residents who commute from other places or live in Brussels temporarily to work, or are you also excluding immigrants who live there? For the purposes of a visitor, it might be most useful to have figures that reflect the total population, but you'd know best.

All the best,

Ikan Kekek (talk) 12:14, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

Hi Ikan, thanks for the links. I'm familiar with Wikipedia but I'm new to Wikivoyage.

Regarding "natives", I mean that while more than 99% of people who are born in Brussels will have either French or Dutch as their first language (language of education), there is also a significant population of immigrants who speak neither. So it's not accurate to say that the entire population of Brussels can be divided into French or Dutch, it's only true for those born in Brussels. "Natives" was the best word I could think of for this.

There's a lot more that could be said about the language situation in Brussels, but I don't think Wikivoyage needs to go further into the details. Great floors (talk) 13:03, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

Probably true; we don't want to get into an encyclopedic discussion of the vagaries of language and language politics in Belgium. Wouldn't a lot of the immigrants speak French, though? I'm no expert on where most of the immigrants to Belgium come from, but I think many are from Francophone countries in Africa. Ikan Kekek (talk) 14:00, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

There are a lot of the Morocan- and Congolese-born immigrants and most have good French, but it can vary based on how good a school they went to and whether decades have passed between learning French in school and coming to Brussels. And there's also the question of whether someone who's first language is Arabic or English but speaks a certain level of French, should they be counted among the French speakers or should they not be in an "other" category? Same question for people with neither French nor Dutch.

But there's also a lot of "economic migrants" from Eastern Europe and Turkey and in the last twenty years there's the ever-increasing immigrants that come to Brussels for its international institutions. These are usually over 20 when they arrive and many learn little or no French, getting by with whatever level of English they have.

To further complicate the counting, a portion of Dutch speakers leave Brussels if their level of French poses a problem when looking for work - while other Dutch speakers work and socialise in Brussels but live just outside the border (where taxes are lower and, on paper at least, it's a purely Dutch-speaking region).

Language censuses are illegal in Belgium (yes, seriously, the results just caused arguments), so it can be hard to find numbers. About 5 years ago a Flemish politician, Ben Weyts (NVA) tried to prove that 15-20% of Brussels was Dutch speaking. He asked the minister for transport what percent of vehicle registrations where done in French vs. Dutch. The result was 93 vs. 7. He said that can't be right, so next he asked the minister for health how many nurses applied for their licences in French vs. Dutch. The result again was 93 vs. 7. He stopped there. Great floors (talk) 15:33, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

That's funny. Thanks for the info. Ikan Kekek (talk) 23:03, 8 March 2017 (UTC)