I am a Fleming living in Flanders, but not near Brussels. I can assure you that many Flemings speak English and French too. Their English might be better though. We NEVER watch dubbed movies or television shows (almost always dubbed), we hang out on international forums, and Flemish artists like Deus, Novastar, Ozark Henry sing in English. During the international film festival, movies from countries like Japan are subtitled in English instead of Dutch….
I myself read lots of Japanese comic books in French( no other translations can be found here).
At university, some of our books are only available in English, and when there is an Erasmus student, teachers often switch to English.

You are right, a lot in Belgium revolves around language issues. But that is only natural when you have two different kinds of people living in one artificial country.

1. Refering to all EN-speaking foreigners in Brussels/Brabant as “eurocrats” is inaccurate.

Amongst native EN – and the various very-close-to native EN speakers (who generally prefer speaking EN rather than NL or FR – such as the Nordics) – many work for a variety of private and public organisations (like ITC, R&D, NGOs, Law Firms, Industry Federations, Consultancies, Lobbyists, Academic Institutions, NATO, Embassies etc) or are entrepreneurs.

Of course there are “eurocrats” in Brussels, but calling all EN-speakers in Brussels/Brabant “eurocrats” plays to a certain, usually negative, stereotype.

2. I have seen many native EN arrive in Brussels with school-level FR and hardly anyone (unless their partner was NL speaking) saw a need to learn NL.

But recently there is a small trend for more EN speakers to learn NL (due to work or personal relationship reasons) and there is definitely more awareness of NL in Brussels life than a few years ago.

However many Brussels-based foreigners, particularly only here for a short period of time, still currently have little incentive to learn NL while in Brussels.

Native NL speakers don’t appear to push/promote NL that much in shops, bars, restaurants etc in, or eventually get frustrated trying and give up (like in comment 1).

The NL language community should get credit for it’s efforts; the multilingual “What’s On” supplement with Brussel Deze Week and OPB events for all language communities are great. But targeting some sort of NL cultural language ghetto around Beurs does leave much of Brussels as a NL-free zone.

3. The blog post touches upon but does not explore where people live and the languages needed for where people work.

My impression is many Flemish people work in or around multilingual Brussels but are really reluctant to live here. For a few foreigners there is the opposite feeling: prefering to live in more multicultural Brussels and work in Flanders (usually for an international EN-speaking organisation).

I am sure Flemish speakers are still the most multilingual in Belgium; but is multilingualism as high amongst the Flemish that don’t work in Brussels? Probably – given the amount of EN tv programmes and music in the Flemish media.

Didn’t mean to write so much, but so much of life in Belgium revolves around language issues …

What surprises me is that the totals for each column in the spreadsheet is generally less than 90%. What does that mean? That more than 10% only knows English or some other non-Belgian language?