The Tensions between Language and Politics in Belgium: Linguistic or Communautarian?

Since its creation in 1830, Belgium has experienced tensions between language and politics. The question of the linguistic or community-related nature of these tensions should be raised since they have regularly been referred to as linguistic by some researchers and as community-related by others. But the choice of these adjectives is not unimportant considering they frame the representations of the political issues at hand. The aim of this article is to tackle this question from the combined perspective of linguistics and political science. In the first part, the article explores the genealogy of the adjectives ‘linguistic’ and ‘community-related’ as well as the multiplicity of their uses in the scientific literature. In the second part, it focuses on the ways citizens see and talk about Belgian federalism through the respective analyses of their mental representations and their conceptual metaphors. Such interdisciplinary endeavour, bringing together theoretical and empirical insights, seeks to yield a renewed understanding of the political relations in Belgium and to contribute to the debate about plurilingual societies.