Hoe 'Vlaams' is 'België'? : een semantische analyse van het begrip 'België' in het taalpolitieke discours van de Vlaamse Beweging (1830-1859)

After the Belgian Revolution (1830), resistance arose in Flemish cities and towns for fear of the complete Frenchification of Flemish-Belgium. Within this first generation of Flemish nationalists, later renamed the 'Flemish Movement', attention is drawn to pushing back this Frenchification by restoring the language rights of the Flemish. To weigh in on policy, the Flemish Movement is forced to position itself at the political level as well. The language-political documents that witness the development of this (language) political orientation form a specific corpus in the entire oeuvre of the Flemish Movement. This contribution collects the five key texts that witnessed the Flemish Movement from the creation of the Kingdom of Belgium until the publication of the final report of the Grievencommissie (1859). Within this language-political discourse, the concept of Belgium plays an important role. In the first decades after the Belgian Revolution, the semantic content of this concept is subject to change. The aim of this contribution is to analyze the semantic diversity and the evolution of meaning of this concept and to explain it based on its political-historical context.