What Is Flanders? Who Are the Flemish? Is Belgium Going to Break Up?

Last month, we asked what Holland is, and things of that nature.

This month, we’re moving up the coast.

Shit.

DOWN the coast.

I always mess that up.

If you’ve spent too much time on Wikipedia before falling asleep, you probably know that there are two halves of Belgium, but you don’t remember a whole lot more than that. On the Belgium topic. You can tell people all about Watergate.

We’re here today to pick up where your memory of that rabbit hole peters out.

There are technically three “regions” of Belgium, but one is Brussels, and I’m guessing they made that separate for administrative reasons or so that the Walloniacs didn’t feel like they got the short end of the stick. Really, there are two halves: The north half is Flanders, the south half is Wallonia. In Flanders, they speak Flemish, which is evidently a dialect of Dutch, so really they speak Dutch. In Wallonia, they speak French, but there’s a couple little enclaves that speak German. That’s what it looks like on this map, at least, taken from (of course) Wikipedia. Yellow is Flemish, red is French, blue is German, orange is obviously Brussels because that’s what you get when you blend red and yellow and leave the Germans out.

Flanders has more population, Flanders is wealthier, Wallonia used to have a bunch of coal and iron but so did lots of places and that isn’t doing much for them right now. There’s a constant question of whether the two should split up. It’s always been kind of weird that they’re the same country. If they do split up, though, does that mean Belgium kicks Wallonia out? Does that mean Flanders leaves Belgium? Does Wallonia get absorbed by France or merge with Luxembourg or something like that? Basically, do we get Belgium and Wallonia or do we get Flanders and Belgium or do we get Flanders and Wallonia or do we get some other arrangement where one of them dissolves into something else? This is the question. Besides the question of whether they’ll actually split. Belgium ranks surprisingly high on the countries–that–might–split–up list.

Since we’re in the area, one thing we didn’t really figure out last time: Do the Dutch people who aren’t Hollanders have their own name or are they just Dutch?

We aren’t finding a clear answer to this question, but we did find that there’s another subset like the Hollanders: The Frisians. They’re actually the Hollanders’ neighbors to the north (and/or east, depends where you’re at in Holland). There’s a state called Friesland, and then more Frisians live east of there and even north of there, in Germany up towards Denmark. We might have to circle back on the rest of the Netherlands. This feels like it’s going towards us printing out multiple maps of the European continent and hand-marking various divisions, decade by decade and century by century.

For now, though, we’re going to leave this on Belgium: There’s Flanders, there’s Wallonia, keep an eye on them splitting up. Flemish is actually Dutch, too. That feels important.