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For most of its history, what is now Belgium was either a part of a larger territory, such as the Carolingian Empire, or divided into a number of smaller states, prominent among them being the Duchy of Lower Lorraine, the Duchy of Brabant, the County of Flanders, the Prince-Bishopric of Liège, the County of Namur, the County of Hainaut and the County of Luxembourg.
Belgium, [a] officially the Kingdom of Belgium, [b] is a country in Northwestern Europe. The country is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeast, France to the south, and the North Sea to the west. It covers an area of 30,689 km 2 (11,849 sq mi) [4] and has a population of more than 11.7 million ...
The Latin name was revived in 1790 by the short-lived United Belgian States which was created after a revolution against Austrian rule took place in 1789. Since no adjective equivalent to "Belgian" existed at the time, the French noun "Belgique" (or "Belgium") was adopted as both noun and adjective; a phenomenon borrowed from Latin which was ...
Belgian Congo, a former name: As above, following the Free State's union with Belgium in 1908, whose name was often included to distinguish the colony from the French-controlled Congo to its north. For further etymology of "Belgium", see above.
The Franks that stayed in the Low Countries had kept their original language, i.e., Old Dutch, also known as "Old Low Franconian" among linguists. At the time the language was spoken, it was known as *þiudisk, meaning "of the people"—as opposed to the Latin language "of the clergy"—which is the source of the English word Dutch.
The name is a portmanteau formed from joining the first few letters of each country's name and was first used to name the customs agreement that initiated the union (signed in 1944). [12] It is now used more generally to refer to the geographic, economic, and cultural grouping of the three countries.
A country demonym denotes the people or the inhabitants of or from there; for example, "Germans" are people of or from Germany. Demonyms are given in plural forms. Singular forms simply remove the final s or, in the case of -ese endings, are the same as the plural forms.
The Low Countries as seen from NASA space satellite. The Low Countries (Dutch: de Lage Landen; French: les Pays-Bas), historically also known as the Netherlands (Dutch: de Nederlanden), is a coastal lowland region in Northwestern Europe forming the lower basin of the Rhine–Meuse–Scheldt delta and consisting today of the three modern "Benelux" countries: Belgium, Luxembourg, and the ...