Flemish-speaking Belgian: English should be 'common language'

Flemish-speaking Belgian: English should be 'common language'

A Flemish-speaking Belgian politician has fanned the flames of a heated EU language debate and outraged the country's French speaking community by calling for English to become Europe's "common language".

Pascal Smet, the schools minister for Flanders, has horrified his country's *francophones* by suggesting that Flemish children, who are Dutch speakers, should learn English as their second language, rather than the French spoken by two fifths of their countrymen in Wallonia.




Belfort and River Dijver, Bruges, Flanders, Belgium

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As well as dismissing French as one of Federal Belgium's official languages, Mr Smet has picked a broader fight by calling for the language of Shakespeare to supplant that of Moliere as the expression of the European ideal.

"I note that the engine of European integration is sputtering. One reason is that we do not speak the same tongue, hence my plea for a common European language," he said.

"It seems logical to me that this is English, which is already the lingua franca of international economics and politics. French is not spoken anywhere in the world while English is now increasingly becoming a global language."

Mr Smets proposal that children in Flanders can dispense with French have deeply angered Belgian Walloons already fearful over their fate and Belgium's future after Flemish separatists won the largest share of the vote in elections three months ago.

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