Cultural Protection or Linguistic Bureaucracy?
Last night, on New Year’s Eve 2026, I had the opportunity to test-run a debate for ACC’s initiative advocating subsidy reform in the arts; specifically, the idea that public support should follow writers rather than languages. As expected, the suggestion that subsidies might be detached from language was not received as a policy critique, but as an attack; an assault on the language itself.
What struck me was not the disagreement, but the nature of the defense. The counter-argument was not about outcomes, fairness, or artistic vitality. It was about protection. About territory. About the implicit belief that language, once questioned as a criterion for funding, must be defended as the highest possible cultural value.
This clarifies something essential. When language is the only skill a class possesses, it is elevated into the highest form of skill. For many politicians and administrators, speaking well and writing neatly are not tools among others; they are the entire toolkit. When a writer enters that space as an independent actor, it does not feel like competition. It feels like intrusion.
In Belgium, artists in almost every discipline can be subsidized regardless of nationality. Dancers, musicians, visual artists, even athletes; all can receive public support if their work contributes to the cultural or social fabric. There is one notable exception: writers.
For writers, subsidies do not primarily follow the individual or the quality of the work. They follow the language.
This distinction is usually justified as cultural protection. Language, we are told, must be preserved. Supporting writers in “our” language is framed as safeguarding heritage. Any attempt to redirect subsidies toward writers themselves, rather than toward the linguistic container they work in, is immediately interpreted as an assault on the language.
That reaction is revealing, not because it is emotional, but because it is increasingly detached from social reality.
Over the past decade, English has quietly become the most functional shared language among younger generations in Belgium. In 2024, 60.5% of Belgians aged 15 to 34 reported good to very good knowledge of English, surpassing both Dutch (57.1%) and French (56.3%). In practical terms, English already operates as a first or dominant language for a substantial part of the population, regardless of what policy documents still assume.
This reality becomes even clearer when one looks at how language is actually acquired. Children in Flanders often become comfortable in English before they master French, despite receiving formal French instruction and no formal English education until secondary school. By the end of primary school, many Flemish pupils already command a richer English vocabulary than a French one, acquired almost entirely through media, gaming, music, and online interaction.
Language, in other words, is not an endangered animal. It is infrastructure. It exists to be used, bent, challenged, and sometimes broken by sentient beings who think, imagine, and articulate. A language survives because people do meaningful things with it; not because it is administratively protected from competition.
When subsidies are attached to language rather than to writers, the system quietly stops rewarding creation and starts rewarding compliance. The central question shifts from “Is this work necessary, truthful, or artistically strong?” to “Does it reinforce the symbolic status of the language?” That shift marks the transition from cultural policy to linguistic bureaucracy. This is also when readers move elsewhere. No one wants to read English, Dutch, Arabic, or Albanian as such; readers want good books, and they will find them wherever they are written.
The paradox deepens in a society where language use is rapidly pluralizing. More than 27% of children in Flanders no longer speak Dutch at home. While this includes many languages, English plays an increasingly central role in urban areas and in the Flemish periphery around Brussels, where it often functions as a neutral contact language across communities.
Sociologists have described this as a kind of Trojan horse effect. English does not replace Dutch outright; it subtly reshapes it through constant exposure. Syntax, vocabulary, and rhythm migrate. This is not decay. It is how living languages evolve when they are actually used.
At the same time, Flanders consistently ranks among the highest regions in the world for English proficiency, outperforming neighboring countries. This has led to serious debates about formalizing Dutch–English bilingual primary education, not out of ideological enthusiasm, but because children already operate bilingually in practice and the labor market increasingly demands it.
Why, then, the resistance when writers rather than languages are proposed as the primary object of support?
The answer lies in power, not preservation. Writing is not just another art form. It overlaps directly with the domain of politics. Politicians, administrators, and cultural gatekeepers derive much of their authority from language; from speaking well, writing well, framing narratives, and controlling moral vocabulary. For many of them, this is not one skill among others; it is the only one.
When a writer enters that terrain as a subsidized, independent agent, something destabilizing happens. The monopoly on articulation is threatened. The idea that language might serve truth, clarity, or inner justice rather than power becomes dangerous. It is safer to turn language into a protected object than to support individuals who might use it too well.
This explains the asymmetry. A foreign violinist does not threaten the symbolic order. A foreign writer does. Not because of nationality, but because writing competes directly with political speech. The resistance is not about identity; it is about territorial defense.
Subsidizing writers rather than languages would force institutions to confront a simple fact: language is a medium, not a moral authority. Writers do not exist to preserve language. Language exists so that writers, thinkers, and citizens can say what must be said.
There is also a legal argument here, and it is not marginal. Citizens who contribute through taxation to public cultural funds are entitled, in principle, to equal access to the benefits of those funds. When support is restricted by language rather than by citizenship, residence, or contribution, a form of indirect exclusion emerges. Writers who live, work, and pay taxes in Belgium but write in English or another language are asked to finance a system from which they are structurally barred.
This intersects directly with freedom of expression. Freedom of speech does not mean the right to speak only in officially sanctioned languages; it means the right to articulate truth, experience, and critique without being penalized for the medium chosen. This principle is not abstract. Article 19 of the Belgian Constitution guarantees freedom of opinion and expression and explicitly affirms that the use of language is free, subject only to limited regulation in administrative and judicial matters. There is no constitutional hierarchy of languages in private or artistic expression.
At the European level, Article 11 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union protects the right to freedom of expression and information, including the freedom to impart ideas “without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.” Language choice is not exempted. Conditioning public cultural support on linguistic conformity therefore sits in clear tension with the spirit, if not always the letter, of these guarantees.
A Belgian truth is not Belgian only when expressed in French or Dutch. Social reality, political insight, and artistic necessity do not change their nature when articulated in another language. To condition public support on linguistic conformity is to quietly privilege certain forms of speech over others, not on artistic grounds, but on symbolic ones.
Until cultural policy accepts this, subsidies will continue to protect symbols instead of people; structures instead of sentient beings. And the loudest defense of “the language” will often come from those who have nothing else to defend.
One final point must be stated plainly: if the goal is to protect the Flemish language, current practices often achieve the opposite. Spending public money translating obscure Belgian works into ever more obscure languages does little to strengthen Flemish as a living language. What strengthens a language is relevance. Translate into Flemish the voices that speak meaningfully about Belgium and its people; allow writers who live here, observe here, and think here to write freely and be supported. That is how you create books people want to read. And that, in turn, is how you ensure that the next generation reads more Flemish.
