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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 ...
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.
The meaning and origin of name of Latvian people is unclear, however the root lat-/let- is associated with several Baltic hydronyms and might share common origin with the Liet-part of neighbouring Lithuania (Lietuva, see below) and name of Latgalians – one of the Baltic tribes that are considered ancestors of modern Latvian people.
The name Vlaanderen is formed from a stem flām-, meaning "flooded area" (cf. Norwegian flaum ‘flood’, English dialectal fleam ‘millstream; trench or gully in a meadow that drains it’), with a suffix -ðr-attached. [50] The Old Dutch form is flāmisk, which becomes vlamesc, vlaemsch in Middle Dutch and Vlaams in Modern Dutch. [51]
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 ...
For example, a Low Countries derby (Derby der Lage Landen), is a sports event between Belgium and the Netherlands. Belgium separated in 1830 from the (northern) Netherlands. The new country took its name from Belgica, the Latinised name for the Low Countries, as it was known during the Eighty Years' War (1568–1648). The Low Countries were in ...
Its meaning narrowed yet again during the French and Dutch periods and, at Belgian independence, the term designated only Belgians speaking a Romance language (French, Walloon, Picard, etc.) The linguistic cleavage in the politics of Belgium adds a political content to "the emotional cultural, and linguistic concept". [ 9 ]
Since Belgium has three national languages — Dutch, French and German — Belgian names are similar to those in the neighbouring countries: the Netherlands, France and Germany. Place names (regions, towns, villages, hamlets) with a particle meaning "from" (de in French, del in Walloon, or van in Dutch) are the most numerous. An uncapitalised ...