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Flemish people also emigrated at the end of the fifteenth century, when Flemish traders conducted intensive trade with Spain and Portugal, and from there moved to colonies in America and Africa. [28] The newly discovered Azores were populated by 2,000 Flemish people from 1460 onwards, making these volcanic islands known as the "Flemish Islands".
An estimated 141,580 people, or 0.0486%, [113] in the United States still speak the Dutch language, including its Flemish variant, at home as of 2013. This is in addition to the 23,010 and 510 speakers, respectively, of the Afrikaans and West-Frisian languages, both closely related to Dutch. [ 113 ]
For example, English has about 450 million native speakers but, depending on the criterion chosen, can be said to have as many as two billion speakers. [4] There are also difficulties in obtaining reliable counts of speakers, which vary over time because of population change and language shift.
Supporters of the Flemish Movement even call it a nation and pursue Flemish independence, but most people (approximately 75%) living in Flanders say they are proud to be Belgian and opposed to the dissolution of Belgium. 20% is even very proud, while some 25% are not proud and 8% is very not proud. Mostly students claim to be proud of their ...
The European Union is a supranational union composed of 27 member states. The total English-speaking population of the European Union and the United Kingdom combined (2012) is 256,876,220 [70] (out of a total population of 500,000,000, [71] i.e. 51%) including 65,478,252 native speakers and 191,397,968 non-native speakers, and would be ranked 2nd if it were included.
The term Flemish itself has become ambiguous. Nowadays, it is used in at least five ways, depending on the context. These include: An indication of Dutch written and spoken in Flanders including the Dutch standard language as well as the non-standardized dialects, including intermediate forms between vernacular dialects and the standard.
Almost all of the inhabitants of the Capital region speak French as either their primary language (50%) or as a lingua franca (45%). [4] [5] Many Flemish people also speak French as a second language. Belgian French is in most respects identical to the French of France, but differs in some points of vocabulary, pronunciation, and semantics.
Many Flemish people still speak dialects of Dutch in their local environment. Walloon , considered either as a dialect of French or a distinct Romance language , [ 174 ] [ 175 ] is now only understood and spoken occasionally, mostly by elderly people.