French Community of Belgium Belgium includes 4.5 million people, of whom: French speakers who live in the Flemish Region are not included in the official numbers for the French-speaking Community, since the French Community has no jurisdiction in that region. Their number is unknown, given the absence of sub-nationality status and the discouragement of linguistic criteria in census-taking. Estimates of the French-speaking population of Flanders vary from 120,000, around 200,000, to around 300,000. The French Community of Belgium makes up about 41% of the total population of Belgium; 58% of the population belongs to the Flemish Community, and 1% to the German-speaking Community. For
Terminology of the Low Countries English. Many languages however, do have a cognate or calque derived from the Dutch adjective "Nederlands": Toponyms: The Low Countries () refers to the historical region "de Nederlanden": those principalities located on and near the mostly low-lying land around the Rhine–Meuse–Scheldt delta. That region corresponds to all of the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, forming the Benelux. The name "Benelux" is formed from joining the first two or three letters of each country's name Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg. It was first used to name the customs agreement that initiated the union (signed in 1944) and is now used more generally to