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Michel Vandenbroeck grew up in the late 1960's in Brussels and reflected on multilingualism in Children in Europe (December 27, 2007):

"For each of their children, my parents chose a name that both Dutch-speakers and French-speakers see as 'one of ours.  My father's family is predominantly from Brussels.  This meant that at home you switched rapidly between French, Dutch and the Brussels dialect, often several times in just one sentence.  French was dominant outside the house, because -- as my grandfather said -- it is the language of the world.  Although he always spoke the Brussels Dutch dialect with me, he never liked being caught in public with a Dutch newspaper.  Nevertheless he sent my father to a Dutch-speaking school.  My mother's family comes from  Flanders and therefore only spoke Dutch.  However, she went to a French-speaking boarding school for her secondary education as it was a question of getting on in life.

"The wonderful absurdity of Belgium, and of Brussels in particular, meant that from being a child I grew up in a multi-lingual environment.  In short, my parents gave me -- partly intentionally, partly by pure chance -- one of the best gifts for the rest of my life; being multilingual.  And what I'm most thankful for is not acquiring both languages without even having to try.  It's the fact that they have opened the door for me to two cultural communities, each with their own novels and television series, their own songs and theatres, and their own way of putting the world to rights at the bar late at night.

"But let's imagine for a moment that my parents had emigrated from the Riff mountains in North Africa. They might still have given me the same gift of being multilingual:  I would have learned Berber and French. But the chances of singing my parents' praises in Children in Europe would be extremely remote. That's how it is.  A French-speaking child with a good knowledge of Dutch is labeled bilingual in this country; a Berber speaking child with a good knowledge of French would be labeled a child with a language deficiency, needing remedial work.  Of course, there is nothing wrong with giving children like that some more intensive work in the dominant language from time to time.  After all, a good knowledge of the dominant language is necessary to make a place for yourself in our society.  It's just a shame that the child is labeled as 'having a different native language,' and not as 'bilingual;' and it's a shame that the rest of her group can't actually pick up some of her knowledge of Berber."

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