First and foremost: I'm a progressivre left leaning unionist who identifies as Belgian and European and is linguistically Flemish.

That being said, I do wonder why Belgian localised websites nearly always start in French and sometimes don't even have a Flemish version, but do in French and English, while the most common spoken language in Belgiym by quite a margin is Flemish.

Example: www.marshall.com

Again, not a flamingant, not even close. Just wondering (and sometimes annoyed)

by CoffeeAndNews

17 comments

  1. Because getting a translator for French or English is far, far cheaper than getting one for Dutch

  2. There are so many examples where it’s the opposite for me. My browser is configured in EN and I guess websites don’t know what to do with that and default to whatever. It’s more often than not NL, but I guess anecdotal

  3. Xbox store is the saddest one, only allowing me to rent french dubbed movies. (And it’s unfixable , i been complaining for 6 years now)

  4. I hate just because I am Belgian I get by default Dutch… Eek. Better be English by default at this point.

  5. My franstalige friends always complain that the websites open in Dutch. I argued that it’s the language of the majority, which makes sense to use Dutch as default.

    To each their own…

  6. Probably because there’s a bigger market in French and English talking people than Dutch ones so they already have the translation ready.

    But it very often happens that I, a Walloon, have ads in Dutch on YouTube and twitch or open a website that automatically opens in Dutch.

  7. Because Flemish speakers have a bigger chance of knowing English than French speakers

  8. If that make you feel better, online, I got most of my adds in dutch

  9. I’m in the other world. Despite having Dutch as a native language, being born here, not even “X generation of immigrants” as my family has roots here since whatever century in the past. I use English when visiting websites.

    My pet peeves are usually (1) if a geolocation is applied, they think I am French speaking by default because of Belgium and thus set the site in French directly. Not all sites have a Dutch counterpart. No problem. I can continue in English, but then I get “kicked” to a different area and it tells me that I’m from Belgium and that this page is not applicable for me. What? Whelp, back to Belgium and continue by French then.

    (2) browser locale’s are often not memorized. It’s a simple code that I can write out and test in less than a hour.

    (3) never understood this; English option is not given but if you change the domain, it is present at those …

  10. It’s weird because for me the standard setting is Dutch most of the time, while I’m living in Wallonia. (And very specifically the German part, but that language usually isn’t respected, not even by the government pages.) all my PC settings are english, so idk why it’s wanting me to read Dutch so badly.

  12. Playstation store and crunchyroll also have this issue.

    A lot of content is only available in french (or english)

  13. this has little to do with Belgium in this example. The site has no Dutch at all, period, even for the Netherlands. Doesn’t even offer Portuguese for e.g. Brazil–it seems to only have English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Korean.

  14. Walloon here, I get my fair share of ads in Dutch and sometimes websites default to Dutch too. Bah

  15. I get really annoyed by it, specially with the French. Cannot they just set up English for all and then you can chose FR if you needed?

  17. There is no reason to put the flamingant disclaimer. Don’t let people guilt-trip you for asking an honest question.

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