Flemings Erotic

The Flemings are the Dutch-speaking people of the northern half of Belgium, concentrated in the five provinces of Flanders and spilling, in dwindling numbers, across the border into the French arrondissement of Dunkirk. What sets them apart is less a single ancestry than a sustained linguistic stubbornness: for over a century they have organised their politics, schools, universities and broadcasters around the defence of Dutch against the cultural pull of French, and that long contest has shaped almost everything else about how they see themselves. The result is a population that often defines itself first by what it speaks, and only secondarily by the country it shares with the Walloons to the south.

Their language is a regional standard of Dutch, mutually intelligible with the Dutch of the Netherlands but carrying its own cadence, vocabulary and a richer set of dialects — West Flemish, in particular, can leave a Dutch speaker from Amsterdam visibly working. The dialects survive better here than in most of the Netherlands; a grandmother in Bruges and a teenager in Antwerp may sound like inhabitants of different language regions even when both can switch to standard Dutch on demand. French loanwords and turns of phrase are common in the south of Flanders, especially in Brussels' Flemish periphery, and form a quiet record of the centuries when French was the language of advancement.

Catholicism is the historical religion and is still the dominant one by census, but practice has thinned dramatically over two generations. The church's footprint, however, remains everywhere: in the procession of the Holy Blood at Bruges, in the giants paraded through Aalst and Dendermonde at carnival, in the beguinages and the Trappist breweries that turned monastic discipline into some of the most respected beers in the world. Flemish identity carries a strong civic tradition out of the medieval cloth towns — Ghent, Bruges, Ypres, Antwerp — whose wealth funded the painters from Van Eyck to Rubens and whose guild politics still echo in a regional habit of mistrusting central authority.

Geographically the homeland is flat, dense, and worked: a coastal plain rising into low hills, broken by canals and motorways, with one of the highest population densities in Europe. The Flemings have lived in this small, contested corner long enough that war cemeteries from Ypres, the polders behind the dunes, and the spires of belfry towns all read, to them, as ordinary scenery rather than heritage.