BRIO language barometer 4: Multilingualism

1. Background

One of the striking findings of the language barometer survey is the increasing discrepancy between the number of people whose command of a language is 'good to excellent' and the number of people in Brussels who actually use the language. A decline in language skills does not imply any decrease in the use of this language, often the opposite (link Fiche1).

2. Language knowledge versus language use

Table 1 shows a list of the ways in which the people who have a good or excellent command of the four best-known languages in Brussels have acquired these languages. What is striking here is that the proportion of Brussels inhabitants who learned the language at home has never been higher than people who acquired the language through the education system or elsewhere. In the case of French and Dutch in particular, the number of Brussels inhabitants claiming to have a good or excellent command of the language when it is not their home language is falling.

Table 1. Acquisition of Dutch/French/English/Arabic (LB4)

However, the use of these languages is higher than can be expected from Table 1.

3. Actual multilingual situation

It is obvious that several languages are used in private conversations in a society characterised by a high level of diversity such as Brussels. But in everyday life and in other linguistic fields, several languages are also very often spoken in Brussels. Despite the fact that speaking French in all circumstances cannot be a problem for 87% of Brussels residents, diversity in the use of languages is increasing.

Tables 2 and 3 illustrate this trend. Table 2 refers to the mostly informal use of language with neighbours. Table 3 shows the use of language in the Brussels workplace, a field that may be covered by a number of different regulations.

French is spoken with neighbours in half of all cases, while several languages are spoken in other cases. Very few Brussels residents speak only Dutch, English or another language with their neighbours. Besides the traditional Dutch/French combination, the use of English together with French is also increasing.

Table 2. Languages spoken with neighbours

Language use in the workplace shows the same trend, although monolingualism is even less frequent there and combining the three contact languages is gradually becoming commonplace.

Table 3. Language use in the workplace

The above linguistic spheres illustrate the way in which languages are used in a multilingual urban context. Let us take the example of Dutch: 16.3% of people claim to have a good to excellent command of the language but 23.9% use it when communicating with their neighbours, and as many as 46.2% sometimes speak Dutch in the workplace.

Finally, table 4 illustrates language use in shops, showing not only a similar shift in language behaviour between LB1 and LB4 as apparent in other fields, but also demonstrating that more than a third of Brussels residents from monolingual French-speaking households do not confine themselves to French either in a field where the use of French very dominant (81.8% in LB1).

Table 4. Table 4. Use of languages in the shopping environment according to home language (LB1, LB4)

This proves another way of using languages. The highest score for young people's knowledge of Arabic in BL3 was in itself an illustration of this, as young people are producing their own Brussels version of Arabic, a mixture with French, slang and their parents' language, and still tend to consider it as Arabic. People are therefore increasingly inclined to mix other languages, even in the same conversation, or a passive knowledge of the language makes it possible for it to be used in conversations. This way of using language might be prompted by an insufficient knowledge of the language. But for others categories, such as young people, it may also be a deliberate strategy, even if they have a good enough command of languages to hold a conversation in a conventional language. This diversity is perpetuated by a changing pattern of communication and the increasing importance of social media and transnational contacts, such that a knowledge of local official languages is seen to be less pressing.