Flanders is a language, a region, and a medieval county at once
Flanders names Dutch-speaking northern Belgium—and several overlapping cultural, political, and historical zones that sometimes spill into France and the Netherlands. Most Flemings live in the Flemish Region, yet Brussels is the official capital for Flanders as for Belgium.
Fleming is the word for a person from Flanders and Flemish the adjective, which can also mean the local Dutch dialects or Belgian Standard Dutch in general. The Flemish Region has its own elected government, but its official capital is the City of Brussels, which sits outside it in the mostly French-speaking Brussels-Capital Region. There the Flemish government's powers are largely limited to culture and schooling.
The land is mostly flat and includes all of Belgium's North Sea coast. It touches France's Nord department near the sea, the Dutch provinces of Zeeland, North Brabant and Limburg, and the Walloon provinces of Hainaut, Liège and Walloon Brabant. With 45 percent of Belgium's area it held 6,821,770 people in January 2024, 58 percent of the national total, at about 501 per square kilometre on largely fertile farmland. Bilingual Brussels forms an enclave inside it, while Flanders has exclaves of its own: Voeren, wedged between Wallonia and the Netherlands, and Baarle-Hertog, 22 fragments surrounded by Dutch territory.
Around AD 900 the County of Flanders ran from the Strait of Dover to the Scheldt estuary, roughly today's West and East Flanders plus bits of France and the Netherlands. Ghent and Bruges, and later Antwerp in Brabant, grew rich weaving imported wool into cloth, making the area one of Europe's most urban and wealthy, with art and architecture to rival northern Italy.
Belgium's nineteenth-century industrial boom happened mainly in Wallonia, but heavy investment in ports after 1950 modernised Flanders, and it and Brussels are now far richer than the south. State reforms created a Flemish Region and a Flemish Community, later merged, though the Community's cultural remit also covers Brussels. Around 6.5 million Belgians, about 60 percent, speak Dutch as their first language.
Source: Flanders
