Flemish settlers once filled the Azores and half of an English port
From 1460 about 2,000 Flemings settled the newly found Azores, which became known as the Flemish Islands, and the city of Horta takes its name from a Flemish explorer. Back in Europe, weavers from Flanders reshaped English towns, leaving surnames like Fleming scattered across Britain.
Today Flemings are the Dutch-speaking people of Flanders and make up about 60 percent of Belgium's population. The word was once purely geographic: everyone in the medieval County of Flanders, which spread into modern France and the Netherlands, was a Fleming whatever their language. Modern Flanders also includes parts of the old Duchy of Brabant and County of Loon. Flemish identity sharpened after the Belgian Revolution of 1830. Under French rule from 1794 to 1815 French had been imposed in public life, and once Belgium broke from the Netherlands, new laws limited Dutch. The resulting Flemish Movement spent the next 150 years pressing for the language.
Flemings speak the southern variety of Dutch, often called Flemish, whose dialects differ from the standard in some vocabulary and grammar. They generally do not see themselves as Dutch, and strong local loyalties to province, city and dialect persist. Around 75 percent are baptised Catholic, yet under 8 percent attend Mass regularly. Their official flag, adopted in 1991, puts a black lion on a yellow ground and gives it a red tongue and claws.
Migration runs through their history. Early in the twelfth century, Flemings escaping a storm on their coast were resettled by Henry I in Pembrokeshire, changing its accent so much that part of it was called Little England beyond Wales. Edward III invited Flemish cloth weavers in the fourteenth century, and later generations went to Colchester and Sandwich, where around 1,600 Flemings in 1582 may have made up nearly half the town. In Poland, the Flemming noble family settled from the thirteenth century, and architects Anthonis van Obbergen and Willem van den Blocke designed mannerist buildings.
In the Azores, grain windmills, São Jorge cheese and Holy Spirit festivals still reflect Flemish roots. Later waves reached Canada from the 1870s, working in the flour mills and railway yards of Saint Boniface and later Ontario's tobacco towns, and Wisconsin, where the town of Belgique was settled almost entirely by Flemings.
Source: Flemish people
