mbewane
Knicks: 93 til infinity
I forgot to add something: the fact that the Flemings want to protect theior langauge is legitimate: indeed, Brussels is spreading (like all big cities tend to do), not officialy (city limits are fixed by law) but in the "facts" more and more people working, studying, generally "living" in Brussels actually have their house in "De Rand", which would be the Dutch-speaking periphery of Brussels. Problem is: most of those people moving out of Brussels are french-speakers (which included Belgians, but also a LOT of immigrants) or...english-speaking EU-expats. Neither group is very keen on learning Dutch, for various reasons. So some of those "Flemish" towns around Brussels already are majoritarilly french-speaking, but officially they are still dutch-speaking (yes, it's complicated and makes no sense, but we are talking about Belgium).
So the fear of seeing Flanders "shrinking" and "losing" other towns to french-speakers, immigrants and EU-expats is very real, and I can somewhat understand it: in Brussels, French is losing ground to English (and, to a lesser extent, to Arabic, Italian...) and I'm none too pleased by that: everyone likes his/her own language. BUt the thing is that Flemings, instead of making the language/culture more "interesting", "fun", "attractive", have used it as a political weapon to create a "Vlaams natie" (Flemish nation), to deepen the divide between both communities and as a language that non-native speakers HAVE to learn, as opposed to a language they would WANT to learn. I learned Italian not because I HAD to, but because I WANTED to: I don't see how you can impose a language on someone, and they, given their own history, fully know that.
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when I try and speak ENGLISH to them. 
. At least ASK me if I speak english first. This is where I agree with Flemings, that when you go somewhere, you should at least try to pick up a couple words of the local language, it makes SO MUCH of a difference. 
