Belgium Culture & Language

Belgian culture is genuinely two cultures with a shared set of habits, and the habits are what a visitor notices first.

Beer

Belgian brewing is on the UNESCO intangible heritage list, and with reason. Six of the world’s Trappist breweries are here, making beer inside working abbeys. In the Senne valley, lambic is fermented by wild yeast that lives in the air of the brewery, aged in barrels for up to three years and blended into gueuze — a method used nowhere else. Add witbier, saison, dubbel and tripel, each with its own glass, and a cafe culture built around drinking them slowly.

Comics

The bande dessinée is treated as a serious form here. Hergé’s Tintin, Peyo’s Smurfs and Morris’s Lucky Luke are Belgian, Brussels has a comic strip museum in a Horta building and murals across the city centre, and the medium has a standing it lacks in most of the English-speaking world.

Painting

The Flemish Primitives — Van Eyck, Van der Weyden, Memling — invented much of what oil painting could do. Bruegel documented peasant life; Rubens ran a workshop like a business; and Magritte turned the ordinary strange.

Carnival and processions

The Carnival of Binche, with its Gilles in wax masks throwing oranges, and the Ducasse of Mons are both UNESCO-listed, and neither is staged for visitors.

Chips and chocolate

Chips are fried twice, served in a paper cone with mayonnaise from a frituur, and Belgians will tell you they were invented here. The chocolate industry is genuinely of a different order from most countries’.

Belgium has three official languages, and which one you need depends entirely on where you are standing. Dutch — called Flemish locally, though it is the same language — is spoken by about sixty per cent of the population, in Flanders. French is spoken by around forty per cent, in Wallonia. A small German-speaking community lives in the east.

Brussels is officially bilingual in French and Dutch, though French predominates in practice, and all signage there is in both.

The language question is politically sensitive. Addressing someone in Flanders in French, or in Wallonia in Dutch, can be received coolly. English is the safe neutral option, is very widely spoken in Flanders and in Brussels, and somewhat less so in rural Wallonia.

Useful either way: bonjour or goedendag, merci or dank u, and een pintje or une bière, which will get you further than most phrases.