Welcome to our new episode of Ethnic Policy podcast, where we discuss and discover topics around ethnicities, ethnic conflicts, and minority politics around the world. Ethnic policy is an entity concerned with identity and ethnic related studies.
Following the last election in 2007, Belgium went without a government for six months because of the divisions and squabbling between Dutch-speaking Flanders to the north and French-speaking Wallonia in the south. Three years later, the same conflict has brought down the government again.
Language is the fundamental flaw at the core of Belgium's existential crisis, taking on the role that race, religion, or ethnicity play in other conflict-riven societies. The country operates on the basis of linguistic apartheid, which infects everything from public libraries to local and regional government, the education system, the political parties, national television, the newspapers, even football teams.
We discuss in this episode with Dr Jan Blommaert, his early work in Africa, and its model of multilingualism societies. We have also discussed with Dr Blommaert the ethnic divide in Belgium, and future of the country.
Dr Jan Blommaert is a Belgian sociolinguist and linguistic anthropologist, Professor of Language, Culture and Globalization and Director of the Babylon Center at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. He is considered to be one of the world's most prominent sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists, and has contributed substantially to sociolinguistic globalization theory, focusing on historical as well as contemporary patterns of the spread of languages and forms of literacy, and on lasting and new forms of inequality emerging from globalization processes. You can follow Dr Blommaert here.
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