Tying the Knot in Language-Divided Belgium: A Research into Marriage Partner Selection in Flemish Municipalities along the Language Border with Wallonia, 1798-1930.

Wieke Metzlar, Radboud University Nijmegen
Koen Matthijs, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Paul Puschmann, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

Six state reforms have turned Belgium from a unitary into a federal state, allowing Dutch-speaking Flemings and French-speaking Walloons a high degree of regional autonomy within the overarching national state structure. While this policy has fostered the emancipation of the previously disadvantaged Flemish community, it also seems to have stimulated in-group over out-group contact. Today, Flemings and Walloons are more likely to marry an immigrant than a fellow Belgian from across the language border. But were marriages between Flemings and Walloon much more common in the past or did Flemings and Walloons avoid each other already during the nineteenth century? Did the language quarrels, the unequal economic development between Wallonia and Flanders (Wallonia industrialized much earlier), and the rise of the Flemish national movement cause both groups to drift apart? This paper aims to gain insight into the process and the dynamics of partner selection in Flemish municipalities along the French-Dutch language border in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. We use data from a new database of the Belgian state archives, covering all marriage certificates of the area that is known today as Flemish Brabant. We focus on municipalities which were located at the language border, as Flemings in these areas in principle had plenty of opportunities to meet a Walloon partner due the geographic closeness of Wallonia. We will analyze how the share of Flemish-Walloon marriages developed over time. Moreover, we will fit logistic regression models on all marriage certificates from these municipalities (n = 75,137) with a dependent variable that distinguishes between Flemish-Walloon and Flemish-Flemish marriages. The models will include period, gender, socio-economic status, age, and migration status and will allow us to determine which Flemish individuals were more likely to marry outside (versus inside) their own community.

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 Presented in Session 245. Marriage and Partner Selection