Article published in:
Revisiting Linguistic Territoriality in Contemporary Europe
Edited by Till Burckhardt, John Coakley and László Marácz
[Language Problems and Language Planning 45:2] 2021
► pp. 218–238

Personality and territoriality in theory and in Belgium

| KU Leuven

Language policy debates regularly refer to the principles of personality and territoriality. Yet the precise meaning of these principles remains unclear. In this contribution, I conceptualize these principles as poles of a continuum between official bilingualism (instantiating the personality principle) and official unilingualism (exemplifying the territoriality principle), with a mixed regime in between (which grants a certain territorial primacy to a language, but allows exceptions based on linguistic affiliation). The question of the determination of particular points on the continuum cannot be separated from the metaterritorial question of the boundaries of the units within which those principles apply. Application of this ‘continuum model’ to Belgium draws attention to three language-political regimes. The first invokes a strict personality principle (Brussels). The second follows the strict territoriality principle (almost all municipalities in Flanders and Wallonia). The third is a mixed regime (a total of 27 ‘municipalities with facilities’ where one language enjoys primacy but speakers of another language enjoy certain linguistic ‘facilities’). The article also analyses the manner in which these regimes were historically established in Belgium in combination with a delineation of the language border and the division of the country into four language areas.

Keywords: linguistic justice, language policy, territoriality principle, Brussels, Belgium
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The continuum model
    • 2.1The language regime question
    • 2.2The language border question
  • 3.Territoriality and personality in Belgium
    • 3.1The language regime issue in Belgium
      • 3.1.1The linguistic territoriality regime
      • 3.1.2The linguistic personality regime
      • 3.1.3The mixed regime
    • 3.2The language border question in Belgium
      • 3.2.1Belgium-wide de facto territoriality
      • 3.2.2De facto territoriality in Wallonia, and a mixed regime benefitting French in Flanders
      • 3.2.3Formal personality, de facto territoriality in Wallonia
      • 3.2.4A mixed regime benefitting Dutch in Flanders; De facto territoriality in Wallonia
      • 3.2.5Territoriality in Flanders and Wallonia; Personality in Brussels; the mixed regime in the municipalities with facilities
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 24 November 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/lplp.00078.sch
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Personality and territoriality in theory and in Belgium