Urban Maps

[Insula Dei]

A lot of boredom, a not very steady hand and sheer unwillingness to do anything productive with my time produced the following:



(Brussels, obviously)

[Insula Dei]

Broadly speaking, yes.

The amount of people with 'Only Dutch' as language spoken at home has about halved in the last 60 years or so (from 9,4% to 5.2%) and these people will still be mostly located in the communes they were located in in 1947 (at the date of the last linguistic census). The demographical composition of the group will have changed somewhat, I suppose, with an increasingly small number of native, neerlandophone Bruxellois being supplemented with an influx of Flemish 'immigrants' in, for example, Brussels proper. 

The largest group in terms of home language in 1947 was 'French and Dutch'; today (in the sample-based BRIO-Taalbarometer) would be 'French and other language'. Obviously that evolution has also wreaked havoc with the etno-linguistic balance of the city. Anderlecht and Molenbeek (two of the darker communes to the West of the city-centre) today are usually thought of as Maghrabi in atmosphere, not Flemish.

[Insula Dei]

Though it would be interesting to have the suburbs (which are actually in conurbation with Brussels) included here as well. When I think of my family there (Vilvoorde / Zaventem/ Sterrebeek area), may aunt's household was obviously bi-lingual (Flemish-German). Two of my cousins married francophone partners, two other Flemish-speakers, but all the marriages ultimately broke up, and my cousins tend to speak Flemish with their children (but also German, when we visit them - they all used to work for longer periods with German companies - so I think that still qualifies as multi-lingual households). I think I have a few years ago seen a map on how Flemish is entering Brussels from the East, would be interesting if that trend goes on.

Btw, just in case you wonder what is driving my interest - my oldest cousin's first marriage broke up because he couldn't stand his father-in-law's Flemish nationalism (with Gross-German undertones) anymore, and what he shared on that with me was quite irritating.

Getting reliable figures for the 'Vlaamse Rand' is the big problem there. The best indicator there are probably municipal election results (since these tend to play out along linguistic lines). But even that still leaves one with a lot of 'noise' (EU-related expats form a non-negligible part of the population of some of these municipalities and in principle are allowed the vote).


For example, based on the 2012 election results,  it's safe to say that Linkebeek is about 80% francophone, but just how accurate that 'about' is, is near impossible to say.