Communities, regions and language areas of Belgium of Belgium. It has a surface area of , or 55.18% of Belgium, and is also divided into 5 provinces which contain a total of 262 municipalities. Its capital is Namur. The official languages are French and, only in the nine eastern municipalities that form the German-speaking Community near the German border, German. Dutch however, may be used for administrative purposes in the four "municipalities with language facilities" at the border with Flanders, and German in two such municipalities near the German-speaking Community. The Walloon Region contains five provinces: Hainaut, Walloon Brabant, Namur, Liège and Luxembourg. Communities, regions and language
History of the Dutch language language are Belgium, the Netherlands, Suriname, Aruba and Curacao. Within the Indo-European language tree, Dutch is grouped within the Germanic languages, which means it shares a common ancestor with languages such as English, German, and Scandinavian languages. This common, but not direct, ancestor (proto-language) of all contemporary Germanic languages is called "Proto-Germanic", commonly assumed to have originated in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe. All Germanic languages are united by subjection to the sound shifts of Grimm's law and Verner's law which originated Proto-Germanic. These two laws define the basic differentiating features of Germanic languages that