Dutch in Belgium Belgium has come to be known as "Flemish". Flemish is also used to refer to one of the historical languages spoken in the former County of Flanders. Linguistically and formally, "Flemish" refers to the region, culture and people of (North) Belgium or Flanders. Flemish people speak (Belgian) Dutch in Flanders, the Flemish part of Belgium. The Brussels-Capital Region is officially bilingual French-Dutch. This means that Dutch should be on an equal footing with French, which is often not the case at local Brussels level: in many municipal and regional services, hospitals, public transport, but also in shops and offices Dutch
History of the Dutch language (modern Wadenoijen), meaning a ford (where one wades), in Tacitus's "Histories". Linguistically speaking, Middle Dutch is a collective name for closely related dialects which were spoken and written between about 1150 and 1550 in the present-day Dutch-speaking region. There was at that time as yet no overarching standard language, but they were all highly mutually intelligible. In historic literature "Diets" and Middle Dutch ("Middelnederlands") are used interchangeably to describe the ancestor of Modern Dutch. Although almost from the beginning, several Middle Dutch variations emerged, the similarities between the different regional languages were much stronger than their differences, especially for written