La Belgique

Belgium is a federal state of about eleven and a half million people, divided into three linguistic communities: the French-speaking community (the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, covering Wallonia in the south and the bilingual capital, Brussels), the Dutch-speaking community (Flanders in the north), and the much smaller German-speaking community (in the east, near the German border). Around 4.5 million Belgians speak French as their first language, and several million more in Flanders and abroad speak it as a second language. Le français de Belgique — Belgian French — is one of the four main varieties of French in Europe, alongside Hexagonal, Swiss, and Luxembourgish French, and shares with Swiss French some of the most famous regional features in the entire French-speaking world.

Belgium as a French name

Belgium is la Belgique, feminine, ending in -e — pattern as expected. Location is en Belgique, origin is de Belgique. The capital is Bruxelles (in French) or Brussel (in Dutch); inhabitants are un Bruxellois / une Bruxelloise.

The adjective for "Belgian" is belge — invariable for gender — and the noun for an inhabitant is un Belge / une Belge, with a capital B.

A common spelling trap: the adjective belge is spelled with a final -e whether the noun is masculine or feminine (un homme belge, une femme belge). The pronunciation is the same in both cases. The noun Belge is also invariable in spelling but takes the article un/une to mark gender.

Septante and nonante: the numerals

The single most cited feature of Belgian French is its numeral system. Belgium uses septante for 70 and nonante for 90, in place of Hexagonal soixante-dix and quatre-vingt-dix.

These are not innovations: septante and nonante are the older Latinate forms (from Latin septuaginta and nonaginta) that survived in Belgium and Switzerland but were displaced in metropolitan France during the late medieval period by the vigesimal (base-20) soixante-dix and quatre-vingt-dix. The numbers 71, 91, 81 work as expected:

For 80, Belgium uses quatre-vingts like France — not octante or huitante. Octante exists in old texts but is not used in modern Belgian speech; huitante is specifically Swiss (and only in a few cantons).

The meals: déjeuner, dîner, souper

One of the most disorienting features of Belgian French for visitors from France is the meal terminology. Belgium uses the older system, with each meal name shifted one step earlier in the day relative to Hexagonal French.

The older system is in fact the historical one: in seventeenth-century French, déjeuner meant the morning meal (etymologically "to break the fast" — des-jeûner), dîner meant the main meal of the day (taken in the early afternoon when court society dined around 2 PM), and souper was the evening meal. Over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, urban France shifted the timing of meals later and later, dragging the meal names with them, until dîner came to mean the evening meal. Belgium, Switzerland, and Quebec did not follow this drift and kept the older system. Belgian French is the conservative variety here, not the innovative one.

The verb forms follow predictably: déjeuner (to have breakfast, in Belgium), dîner (to have lunch), souper (to have dinner). The verb souper exists in Hexagonal French too but means "to have a late-night supper after some evening activity," not the standard evening meal.

Ça goûte: a verb of taste

A particularly Belgian construction is ça goûte — "it tastes good" or "it has a taste of." The verb goûter in Hexagonal French is transitive ("to taste something": Goûte cette sauce) or means "to have an afternoon snack" (l'heure du goûter). The intransitive Belgian usage — ça goûte meaning "it tastes good, it has a pleasant flavor" — is unique to Belgium.

In Hexagonal French, the equivalent would be c'est très bon or ça a un goût de citron — longer, more analytical. The Belgian ça goûte construction is a calque on the Dutch het smaakt, which works the same way ("it tastes" used intransitively to mean "it tastes good"). Centuries of bilingual contact between French and Dutch in Belgium have shaped each language with the other's syntactic patterns.

La drache: the rain

Belgium's other most-cited word is la drache — a sudden, heavy downpour, the kind of rain that arrives without warning and soaks you in seconds. The word is unique to Belgian French (and to northern France, where the same lexical layer survives). The verb dracher — "to pour down" — is equally Belgian.

The expression la drache nationale is a self-deprecating Belgian joke: the weather is reputed to be at its worst on the Belgian national holiday (21 July), and Belgians refer to the rain that traditionally interrupts the festivities as la drache nationale.

Other Belgicisms worth knowing

• un kot — a student room, typically rented near a university. From Flemish kot. Mon fils kote à Louvain — my son lives in student housing in Leuven. No equivalent in Hexagonal French.
• une aubette — a bus or tram shelter. In France, un abribus.
• savoir instead of pouvoir — Belgians use savoir (to know) in many contexts where French uses pouvoir (to be able). Je ne sais pas venir ce soir — I can't come tonight. In Hexagonal French this would parse as "I don't know how to come" — a confusing reading.
• chicon — endive. In France, endive. Une endive and un chicon are the same vegetable.
• carabistouille — silly nonsense. Affectionate, informal. Shared with northern France.

Spelling and the Belge accent

Belgian French follows French orthographic conventions in writing. There is no separate Belgian spelling standard. The 1990 spelling reforms — which simplified some accent and hyphenation rules — were officially adopted by the Communauté française de Belgique, and Belgian schools teach the reformed spellings more consistently than French ones do.

In pronunciation, the Belgian accent has a slightly different vowel inventory from Parisian French. Some Belgian speakers maintain the long/short vowel distinction (maître with a long /ɛː/, mettre with a short /ɛ/) that has been lost in standard Parisian. The /ɛ̃/ versus /œ̃/ distinction (brin vs. brun) is more often preserved in Belgium than in Paris. The intonation tends to be flatter, with less of the rising-falling pattern Parisians produce. None of these features blocks intelligibility; they are accent markers.

Common Mistakes

Key takeaways

Belgian French is the variety spoken by about 4.5 million people in Wallonia and Brussels, with strong institutional support and a substantial literary and journalistic tradition. The most famous regional features are the numerals septante (70) and nonante (90), the meal names (déjeuner = breakfast, dîner = lunch, souper = dinner), the noun la drache for a sudden downpour, the verb construction ça goûte for "it tastes good," and the use of savoir in place of pouvoir in some "be able" contexts. None of these features make Belgian French a separate language — it is the same French — but they mark the speaker as Belgian as surely as a Glaswegian accent marks an English speaker as Scottish. For learners, Belgian French is fully intelligible from any Hexagonal baseline; the converse is also true, with the occasional pause over a septante or a chicon.