As the Belgian elections prove, language can be a divisive issue

Less than half an hour's train ride from the multilingual hub of Brussels, Eddie de Block, the trilingual (French, Flemish and English) mayor of Merchtem, defends the right to run a monolingual town. In a municipality with only 3% French-speakers he passed a law, a few years ago, that everybody must not only learn Flemish, a Dutch dialect, in school, but that even in the playground Flemish only sh