Quiz: ken jij de Nederlandstalige naam van de Waalse gemeente (of omgekeerd)?

28 comments
  1. 7/10. Not great, not terrible.

    It’s obvious that using Dutch names for towns in Wallonia and French names for towns in Flanders can lead to confusion. Now imagine you’re a foreigner, you speak neither of those 2 languages, don’t know how Belgium tends to ‘manage’ these situations, and suddenly in the middle of you driving within the same country all the road signs change names (depending on the route possibly multiple times).

  2. Why not just do what Brussels does? Names the French speakers use next to the one the Dutch speakers use. But in the whole country.
    It’s also my pet peeve with Belgium not having everywhere traffic signs on two languages. Probably much less confusion.
    And I learned many words of Dutch just by reading things passing by Brussels.

  3. 10/10, but I’m bilingual and I fully endorse the change of the roadsigns. We have a language barrier for a reason in this country. If everyone were to be bilingual it wouldn’t be necessary, but that’s not the case in reality and having no clear indications where what language is used will quickly lead to messy situations and tensions.
    While it’s only about roadsigns, we have to respect that languages exist within certain areas and may use whatever name they want to designate a certain town or city. In Germany they have road signs with Luttich as well and I don’t see any issue with that either.

  4. 9/10

    But at least I learned the French name of Jesus-Eik, that I didn’t know as a French-speaker 😅

  5. 5/10, I never heared the French name for Tienen before. Nor did I know the Dutch name for Braine l’Alleud. I always use the original names but for some I heared both before.

  6. 3/10, worst score of all the comments so far. Go me, I guess?

    If I ever have to navigate this country in a car without GPS I’m gonna be so screwed.

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