Impression #3. Languages

Belgians are geniuses at languages. Seriously, they all are. Really :)

In Belgium there are three official languages – Dutch, French, and German, which kids (at least Flemish kids anyway) study at school. Plus, everyone knows English. That’s really a minimum – four languages that everyone knows.

Let me clarify, it’s not “only highly educated people” or anything like that. I literally could not find a person here who wouldn’t speak English, and I interacted with a lot of people since I first moved. And four is just a basis, many people speak Spanish, Portuguese, or Italian on top “because they are all related to Latin so how hard can it be”. So we are talking 6+ languages for a substantial slice of the population.

Again, shortly after we’ve moved and Artem did not yet speak any Dutch, some kids approached him on the playground and (when failed to get a response in Dutch) they switched to French to see if he is by chance Wallonian.

Now to give you some perspective, below is a short clip from a very famous Soviet movie “Guest from the Future” where a girl from the future USSR of 2084 travels to year 1984 and (among other things such as escaping space pirates) shows incredible results at all subjects at school. In 2084 there’s space travel, flying cars (of course!), but the most important part is that all kids are incredibly and unimaginably smart and fit when compared to their 1984 counterparts.

So Alice, the Guest from the Future, the awesome future where the knowledge and ability of every child is greatly expanded, shows off her incredible skills at languages, she speaks what’s just slightly above the number of languages an average Flemish person does.

Meanwhile, I still struggle speaking Dutch here. Barely putting the words together, mixing up de/het, struggling with complex sentences, and failing to produce easy sounds like -ui-, -ij-, or -eu-. Thank God I moved from my rental house at Vijverlaan, because if I needed a service, there’s a good chance they’d never come because they’d never get my -ij-.

At the same time, many Belgians I know imitate Russian and Ukrainian so perfectly I become scared. You should hear how my daughter’s friend Emma reproduces Russian words just by repeating after Kateryna. Even without knowing the words she’s saying, she manages to recreate the sounds with an unexpected precision. Sounds almost perfect, just a little tiny hint of an accent.

This puts some complaints of Russian-speaking people in Ukraine in perspective. They don’t want to learn the most basic Ukrainian, bEcAUsE iT’s HaRd.

Now if that would not be enough, there are hundreds of “dialects” in this small country (you can play with the dictionary here) that provide enough language variation to – according to some people – identify the home village of the dialect speaker with the precision of a few kilometres.

In conclusion: Belgians speak everything and in general are the coolest when it comes to languages!