Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant passages that answer the question.
Query: Is French the national language of Belgium?
The Kingdom of Belgium has three official languages: Dutch, French, and German. A number of non-official, minority languages and dialects are spoken as well.
Belgium is a classic example of a state that is not a nation state. The state was formed by secession from the United Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1830, whose neutrality and integrity was protected by the Treaty of London 1839; thus it served as a buffer state after the Napoleonic Wars between the European powers France, Prussia (after 1871 the German Empire) and the United Kingdom until World War I, when its neutrality was breached by the Germans. Currently, Belgium is divided between the Flemings in the north and the French-speaking or the German-speaking population in the south. The Flemish population in the north speaks Dutch, the Walloon population in the south speaks French or German. The Brussels population speaks French or Dutch.
French is the dominant language in Quebec and Saint Pierre and Miquelon, and is spoken in Manitoba, Prince Edward Island, Ontario, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Louisiana. It is spoken alongside French-based creole languages in Saint Lucia, Dominica, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Martinique, Saint Barthélemy, and the French side of Saint Martin. French is one of the two official and national languages of Canada.
Flanders ( , , ) is the Dutch-speaking northern portion of Belgium and one of the communities, regions and language areas of Belgium. However, there are several overlapping definitions, including ones related to culture, language, politics and history, and sometimes involving neighbouring countries. The demonym associated with Flanders is Fleming, while the corresponding adjective is Flemish. The official capital of Flanders is Brussels, although the Brussels Capital Region has an independent regional government, and the government of Flanders only oversees the community aspects of Flanders life in Brussels such as (Flemish) culture and education.
French is the sole official language of the Ivory Coast. In Abidjan, largest city of the country, 57.6% of the inhabitants over 15 can read and write French, and another 11% can speak it but not write it. The French language is seen as essential by a large majority, especially for dealing with the government and in education. Two thirds of respondents report feeling Francophone. French plays an important role in all areas of public and private life across the whole country. French is increasingly seen as an Ivorian language, and a local variety distinct from standard French has emerged ().
Dutch is a West Germanic language spoken by around 23 million people as a first language and 5 million people as a second language, constituting the majority of people in the Netherlands (where it is the sole official language) and Belgium (as one of three official languages). It is the third most widely spoken Germanic language, after its close relatives English and German.
Dutch is currently an official language of the Netherlands, Belgium, Suriname, Aruba, Sint Maarten, Curaçao, the European Union and the Union of South American Nations (due to Suriname being a member). In South Africa, Afrikaans is spoken, a daughter language of Dutch, which itself was an official language of South Africa until 1983. The Dutch, Flemish and Surinamese governments coordinate their language activities in the "Nederlandse Taalunie" (Dutch Language Union), an institution also responsible for governing the Dutch Standard language, for example in matters of orthography.
French, the official language, is taught in schools and serves as a lingua franca in the country. An estimated 70 languages are spoken in Ivory Coast. One of the most common is Dyula, which acts as a trade language, as well as a language commonly spoken by the Muslim population.
The country of Belgium is divided into three regions. Two of these regions, the Flemish Region or Flanders, and Walloon Region, or Wallonia, are each subdivided into five provinces. The third region, the Brussels-Capital Region, is not divided into provinces, as it was originally only a small part of a province itself.
Approximately 242 languages are spoken in the country, but only four have the status of national languages: Kituba ("Kikongo ya leta"), Lingala, Tshiluba, and Swahili. Although some people speak these regional, or trade languages as first languages, most of the population speak them as a second language after their own tribal language. Lingala was the official language of the colonial army, the "Force Publique", under Belgian colonial rule, and remains to this day the predominant language in the armed forces. Since the recent rebellions, a good part of the army in the East also uses Swahili where it is prevalent.
A French creole, or French-based creole language, is a creole language (contact language with native speakers) for which French is the "lexifier". Most often this lexifier is not modern French but rather a 17th-century koiné of French from Paris, the French Atlantic harbors, and the nascent French colonies. French-based creole languages are spoken natively by millions of people worldwide, primarily in the Americas and on archipelagos throughout the Indian Ocean. This article also contains information on French pidgin languages, contact languages that lack native speakers.
Flanders shares its borders with Wallonia in the south, Brussels being an enclave within the Flemish Region. The rest of the border is shared with the Netherlands (Zeelandic Flanders in Zeeland, North Brabant and Limburg) in the north and east, and with France (French Flanders in Hauts-de-France) and the North Sea in the west. Voeren is an exclave of Flanders between Wallonia and the Netherlands, while Baarle-Hertog in Flanders forms a complicated series of enclaves and exclaves with Baarle-Nassau in the Netherlands. Germany, although bordering Wallonia and close to Voeren in Limburg, does not share a border with Flanders. The German-speaking Community of Belgium, also close to Voeren, does not border Flanders either. (The commune of Plombières, majority French speaking, lies between them.)
French is the second most common language in Canada, after English, and both are official languages at the federal level. It is the first language of 9.5 million people or 29% and the second language for 2.07 million or 6% of the entire population of Canada. French is the sole official language in the province of Quebec, being the mother tongue for some 7 million people, or almost 80% (2006 Census) of the province. About 95% of the people of Quebec speak French as either their first or second language, and for some as their third language. Quebec is also home to the city of Montreal, which is the world's 4th-largest French-speaking city, by number of first language speakers. New Brunswick and Manitoba are the only officially bilingual provinces, though full bilingualism is enacted only in New Brunswick, where about one third of the population is Francophone. French is also an official language of all of the territories (Northwest Territories, Nunavut, and Yukon). Out of the three, Yukon has the most French speakers, comprising just under 4% of the population. Furthermore, while French is not an official language in Ontario, the French Language Services Act ensures that provincial services are to be available in the language. The Act applies to areas of the province where there are significant Francophone communities, namely Eastern Ontario and Northern Ontario. Elsewhere, sizable French-speaking minorities are found in southern Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and the Port au Port Peninsula in Newfoundland and Labrador, where the unique Newfoundland French dialect was historically spoken. Smaller pockets of French speakers exist in all other provinces. The city of Ottawa, the Canadian capital, is also effectively bilingual, as it is on the other side of a river from Quebec, opposite the major city of Gatineau, and is required to offer governmental services in French as well as English.
With more than 10 million inhabitants, Kinshasa is the second largest francophone city in the world after Paris. It is the capital of the most populous francophone country in the world, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where an estimated 24 million people (40% of the total population) can speak French (essentially as a second language). Contrary to Abidjan where French is the first language of a large part of the population, in Kinshasa French is only a second language, and its status of "lingua franca" is shared with Lingala. Kinshasa French also differs from other African French variants, for it has some Belgian French influences, due to colonisation. People of different African mother tongues living in Kinshasa usually speak Lingala to communicate with each other in the street, but French is the language of businesses, administrations, schools, newspapers and televisions. French is also the predominant written language.
Bulgarian is the country's only official language. It's spoken by the vast majority of the Bulgarian population and used at all levels of society. It is a Slavic language, and its closest relative is Macedonian.
The official language of Bulgaria is Bulgarian. According to the 2001 census, 84.5% of the country's population speak Bulgarian natively.
Dutch is an official language of the Netherlands proper, Belgium, Suriname, the Dutch Caribbean municipal (St. Eustatius Saba & Bonaire), Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten. Dutch is also an official language of several international organisations, such as the European Union, Union of South American Nations and the Caribbean Community. At an academic level, Dutch is taught in about 175 universities in 40 countries. About 15,000 students worldwide study Dutch at university.
Most of the provinces take their name from earlier duchies and counties of similar location, while their territory is mostly based on the departments installed during French annexation. At the time of the creation of Belgium in 1830, only nine provinces existed, including the province of Brabant, which held the city of Brussels. In 1995, Brabant was split into three areas: Flemish Brabant, which became a part of the region of Flanders; Walloon Brabant, which became part of the region of Wallonia; and the Brussels-Capital Region, which became a third region. These divisions reflected political tensions between the French-speaking Walloons and the Dutch-speaking Flemish; the Brussels-Capital Region is officially bilingual.
Belgium, officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a state in Western Europe. The 1830 Belgian Revolution led to the establishment of an independent, Belgium under a provisional government and a national congress. Since the installation of Leopold I as king in 1831, Belgium has been a constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy.
Belgium, a federalized state, geographically consists of 3 regions, of which only the Flemish Region and the Walloon Region are subdivided into five provinces each; the Brussels-Capital Region is neither a province nor is it part of one.
Dutch is an official language of Aruba, Belgium, Curaçao, the Netherlands, Sint Maarten, and Suriname. The Netherlands also colonised Indonesia, but Dutch was scrapped as an official language after Indonesian independence and today it is only used by older or traditionally educated people. Dutch was until 1925 an official language in South Africa but evolved in and was replaced by Afrikaans, a partially mutually intelligible daughter language of Dutch.
Disagreement over the country's language policy continued. Some segments of French-speaking Wallonia were concerned that current practices could result in Belgium becoming a bilingual country, with French and Dutch being recognised as official languages everywhere. 
This led to a proposal to split the administration in Belgium to preserve the French-speaking nature of Wallonia and to avoid the possibility that French-speaking civil servants there might have to pass a Dutch language examination.
There are no national TV channels in Belgium. Because of the language divide, there are only channels either in Dutch or French, there is no single company operating TV channels in both the Flemish and the French part. Media laws are created and controlled on a regional level (Flemish or French). Thus the Flemish channels are controlled by Flemish law and the French-speaking ones are controlled by the French community. The public broadcasters still share a building in Brussels, a leftover from the time when the Public Television was still a national (Belgian) competence, however, they have split operations altogether with French language broadcaster RTBF occupying the right half of the building and Flemish broadcaster VRT occupying the left half of the building. They are both governed by different law and a different parliament an example of this is the fact that the French languages public broadcaster RTBF is allowed to sell advertising on television and have actual ad breaks, while the Flemish public broadcaster can only sell product placement and sponsor billboards on television. On their radio channels both are allowed to sell full ad breaks. Both public broadcasters also work in a completely different competitive environment.
Minor standards can also be found in Belgium and Switzerland, with a particular influence of Germanic languages on grammar and vocabulary, sometimes through the influence of local dialects. In Belgium, for example, various Germanic influences in spoken French are evident in Wallonia (for example, to "blink" in English, and "blinken" in German and Dutch, "blinquer" in Walloon and local French, "cligner" in standard French). "Ring" ("rocade" or "périphérique" in standard French) is a common word in the three national languages for beltway or ring road. Also, in Belgium and Switzerland, there are noted differences in the number system when compared to standard Parisian or Canadian French, notably in the use of "septante", "octante/huitante" and "nonante" for the numbers "seventy", "eighty", and "ninety". In other standards of French, these numbers are usually denoted "soixante-dix" (sixty-ten), "quatre-vingts" (four-twenties) and "quatre-vingt-dix" (four-twenties-and-ten).
French varieties spoken in Oceania are also influenced by local languages. New Caledonian French is influenced by Kanak languages in its vocabulary and grammatical structure.
African French is another variety.
Before the outbreak of World War I higher education in Belgium was run in French, despite the presence of a large Dutch-speaking population. French had historically been privileged as the language of the government, civil service and the bourgeois across the country. In the late 19th century, however, the emerging Flemish Movement ("Vlaamse Beweging") increasingly challenged the use of French in majority Dutch-speaking Flanders. In the years before the World War I, the movement had achieved "de jure" legal equality for Dutch as an official national language, but the issue was still contentious at the outbreak of war in August 1914. In particular, the language used in higher education was still being highlighted by the Flemish Movement, as French remained the only language of instruction in all Belgian universities. At the outbreak of war, it appeared that Ghent University, located in the Flemish city of Ghent, would be forced by law to begin teaching in Dutch by 1915, but the outbreak of war and German invasion of Belgium stopped any realization of this objective.