Real funny they coloured it differently, because Flanders literally shares a language with The Netherlands.
To be fair half the world seems to forget Belgium is not all french sometimes, or puts french as the default even though Flanders’ population is almost twice as large as Wallonie. Even adding the population of Brussels and Wallonie, Flanders still has the larger population. (Numbers for stats come from statbel)
To be fair half the world seems to forget Belgium is not all french sometimes
It’s annoying as fuck.
Microsoft/Xbox store used to be almost entirely French when visiting from a Belgian IP, even if you set your profile language to Dutch or English. Not sure how it is nowadays, I don’t come there anymore, but it was like that for at least a decade.
Amazon Prime and Netflix still have many movies and series in dubbed French only for Belgian customers, and not the original version with Dutch or even just English subtitles.
Many sites serve you a French language page by default if you visit from a Belgian IP, and then you have to hunt in the header or footer of the page for the language toggle. You usually can’t even read the cookie permission popup in a language you understand.
Either way if you ignore regional languages you’re not doing linguistics. And the author could not even get it right for national languages, if we even accept that arbitrarily picking one makes any sense.
This map is a masterclass in what not to do and it almost feels like intentional engagement farming.
Real funny they coloured it differently, because Flanders literally shares a language with The Netherlands.
To be fair half the world seems to forget Belgium is not all french sometimes, or puts french as the default even though Flanders’ population is almost twice as large as Wallonie. Even adding the population of Brussels and Wallonie, Flanders still has the larger population. (Numbers for stats come from statbel)
It’s annoying as fuck.
Microsoft/Xbox store used to be almost entirely French when visiting from a Belgian IP, even if you set your profile language to Dutch or English. Not sure how it is nowadays, I don’t come there anymore, but it was like that for at least a decade.
Amazon Prime and Netflix still have many movies and series in dubbed French only for Belgian customers, and not the original version with Dutch or even just English subtitles.
Many sites serve you a French language page by default if you visit from a Belgian IP, and then you have to hunt in the header or footer of the page for the language toggle. You usually can’t even read the cookie permission popup in a language you understand.
For real yeah, like it’s gotta be some default in an internationalisation library. It’s way too common on websites for that not to be the case.
Either way if you ignore regional languages you’re not doing linguistics. And the author could not even get it right for national languages, if we even accept that arbitrarily picking one makes any sense.
This map is a masterclass in what not to do and it almost feels like intentional engagement farming.