All is Quiet on the Eastern Front? Language Contact along the French-German Language Border in Belgium

Abstract

In this chapter we present the results of a composite pilot study on the Linguistic Landscape (LL) in the French-German language border area in eastern Belgium, more specifically in the municipality of Eupen (where German is the official language and language facilities are offered to the French-speaking minority) on the one hand, and the municipality of Malmedy (where French is the official language and language facilities are offered to the German-speaking minority) on the other. In significant contrast to the ‘Flemish Periphery’ around bilingual Brussels (e.g. Housen and Janssens, 2009; Janssens, 2002) or the Flemish communities in the so-called Fourons area (bordering the province of Liège), where language facilities are granted to the French-speaking population (e.g. Witte and Van Velthoven, 1999), the communities alongside the French-German language border in present-day Belgium are hardly ever heard of as loci of struggle over language use or sites that need to be protected against ‘linguistic colonization’. More generally, the municipalities where German is the official language or a ‘facility language’ seem to be quite satisfied with the place they occupy within the federal state that Belgium has gradually become since the 1960s. In this sense, the privileged situation of this ensemble of minority language speakers contrasts with many others that are described in this volume.