Demographics
[edit]
Main article: Demographics of Brussels
Population[edit]
Population density of Europe. Brussels is located between the largest urban centres.
Brussels is located in one of the most urbanised regions of Europe, between Paris, London, the Rhine-Ruhr (Germany), and the Randstad (Netherlands). The Brussels-Capital Region has a population of around 1.2 million and has witnessed, in recent years, a remarkable increase in its population. In general, the population of Brussels is younger than the national average, and the gap between rich and poor is wider.
Brussels is the core of a built-up area that extends well beyond the region's limits. Sometimes referred to as the urban area of Brussels (French: aire urbaine de Bruxelles, Dutch: stedelijk gebied van Brussel) or Greater Brussels (French: Grand-Bruxelles, Dutch: Groot-Brussel), this area extends over a large part of the two Brabant provinces, including much of the surrounding arrondissement of Halle-Vilvoorde and some small parts of the arrondissement of Leuven in Flemish Brabant, as well as the northern part of Walloon Brabant.
The metropolitan area of Brussels is divided into three levels. Firstly, the central agglomeration (French: agglomération opérationnelle, Dutch: geoperationaliseerde agglomeratie) within the regional borders, with a population of 1,218,255 inhabitants. Adding the closest suburbs (French: banlieues, Dutch: buitenwijken) gives a total population of 1,831,496. Including the outer commuter area (French: zone résidentielle des migrants alternants, Dutch: forensenwoonzone), the population is 2,676,701. Brussels is also part of a wider conurbation extending towards the cities of Ghent, Antwerp, and Leuven, known as the Flemish Diamond, as well as the province of Walloon Brabant, in total home to over 5 million people (a little more than 40% of the Belgium's total population).
[verification needed]
01-07-2004
01-07-2005
01-07-2006
01-01-2008
01-01-2015
01-01-2019
01-01-2020
Brussels-Capital Region[verification needed]
1,004,239
1,012,258
1,024,492
1,048,491
1,181,272
1,208,542
1,218,255
-- of which legal immigrants[verification needed]
262,943
268,009
277,682
295,043
385,381
450,000
?
Nationalities[edit]
Largest groups of foreign residents (2022)
 France
68,418
 Romania
45,243
 Italy
35,154
 Morocco
33,955
 Spain
30,609
 Poland
20,060
 Portugal
18,968
 Bulgaria
13,104
 Germany
10,927
 Greece
9,675
Other countries
 Syria
9,555
 Turkey
8,494
 Netherlands
8,287
 Democratic Republic of the Congo
7,836
 India
7,273
 United Kingdom
5,322
 Guinea
5,231
 Brazil
4,834
 Cameroon
4,473
 Algeria
2,996
There have been numerous migrations towards Brussels since the end of the 18th century, when the city acted as a common destination for political refugees from neighbouring or more distant countries, particularly France. From 1871, many of the Paris Communards fled to Brussels, where they received political asylum. Other notable international exiles living in Brussels at the time included Victor Hugo, Karl Marx, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Georges Boulanger, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and Léon Daudet, to name a few. Attracted by the industrial opportunities, many workers moved in, first from the other Belgian provinces (mainly rural residents from Flanders) and France, then from Southern European, and more recently from Eastern European and African countries.
Since the second half of the 20th century, Brussels has been home to a large number of immigrants and émigré communities, as well as labour migrants, former foreign students or expatriates, and many Belgian families in Brussels can claim at least one foreign grandparent. At the last Belgian census in 1991, 63.7% of inhabitants in Brussels-Capital Region answered that they were Belgian citizens, born as such in Belgium, indicating that more than a third of residents had not been born in the country. According to Statbel (the Belgian Statistical Office), in 2020, taking into account the parents' nationality of birth, 74.3% of the population of the Brussels-Capital Region was of foreign origin and 41.8% was of non-European origin (including 28.7% of African origin). Among those aged under 18, 88% were of foreign origin and 57% of non-European origin (including 42.4% of African origin).
This large concentration of immigrants and their descendants includes many of Moroccan (mainly Riffian and other Berbers) and Turkish ancestry, together with French-speaking black Africans from former Belgian colonies, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and Burundi. Many immigrants were naturalised following the great 1991 reform of the naturalisation process. In 2012, about 32% of city residents were of non-Belgian European origin (mainly expatriates from France, Romania, Italy, Spain, Poland, and Portugal) and 36% were of another background, mostly from Morocco, Turkey and Sub-Saharan Africa. Among all major migrant groups from outside the EU, a majority of the permanent residents have acquired Belgian nationality.
Languages[edit]
See also: Francization of Brussels
Languages spoken at home in the Brussels-Capital Region (2013)  French  French and Dutch  Dutch  French and other language  Neither French nor Dutch
Brussels was historically Dutch-speaking, using the Brabantian dialect, but since the 19th century French has become the city's predominant language. The main cause of this transition was the rapid assimilation of the local Flemish population, amplified by immigration from France and Wallonia. The rise of French in public life gradually began by the end of the 18th century, quickly accelerating after Belgian independence. Dutch—of which standardisation in Belgium was still very weak—could not compete with French, which was the exclusive language of the judiciary, the administration, the army, education, cultural life and the media, and thus necessary for social mobility. The value and prestige of the French language were universally acknowledged to such an extent that after 1880, and more particularly after the turn of the 20th century, proficiency in French among Dutch-speakers in Brussels increased spectacularly.
Although a majority of the population remained bilingual until the second half of the 20th century, family transmission of the historic Brabantian dialect declined, leading to an increase of monolingual French-speakers from 1910 onwards. From the mid-20th century, the number of monolingual French-speakers surpassed the number of mostly bilingual Flemish inhabitants. This process of assimilation weakened after the 1960s, as the language border was fixed, the status of Dutch as an official language of Belgium was reinforced, and the economic centre of gravity shifted northward to Flanders. However, with the continuing arrival of immigrants and the post-war emergence of Brussels as a centre of international politics, the relative position of Dutch continued to decline. Furthermore, as Brussels' urban area expanded, a further number of Dutch-speaking municipalities in the Brussels periphery also became predominantly French-speaking. This phenomenon of expanding Francisation—dubbed "oil slick" by its opponents—is, together with the future of Brussels, one of the most controversial topics in Belgian politics.
Bilingual French and Dutch street signs in Brussels
Since its creation in 1989, the Brussels-Capital Region has been legally bilingual, with both French and Dutch having official status, as is the administration of the 19 municipalities. The creation of this bilingual, full-fledged region, with its own competencies and jurisdiction, had long been hampered by different visions of Belgian federalism. Nevertheless, some communitarian issues remain. Flemish political parties demanded, for decades, that the Flemish part of Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde (BHV) arrondissement be separated from the Brussels Region (which made Halle-Vilvoorde a monolingual Flemish electoral and judicial district). BHV was divided mid-2012. The French-speaking population regards the language border as artificial and demands the extension of the bilingual region to at least all six municipalities with language facilities in the surroundings of Brussels. Flemish politicians have strongly rejected these proposals.
The municipalities with language facilities (in red) near Brussels
Owing to migration and to its international role, Brussels is home to a large number of native speakers of languages other than French or Dutch. Currently, about half of the population speaks a home language other than these two. In 2013, academic research showed that approximately 17% of families spoke none of the official languages in the home, while in a further 23% a foreign language was used alongside French. The share of unilingual French-speaking families had fallen to 38% and that of Dutch-speaking families to 5%, while the percentage of bilingual Dutch-French families reached 17%. At the same time, French remains widely spoken: in 2013, French was spoken "well to perfectly" by 88% of the population, while for Dutch this percentage was only 23% (down from 33% in 2000); the other most commonly known languages were English (30%), Arabic (18%), Spanish (9%), German (7%) and Italian and Turkish (5% each). Meanwhile, surveys from 2023 to 2024 suggest that 29% of the population speaks only languages other than French and Dutch in the home, while residents speak a total of 104 languages, up from 72 in 2001. Despite the rise of English as a second language in Brussels, including as an unofficial compromise language between French and Dutch, as well as the working language for some of its international businesses and institutions, French remains the lingua franca and all public services are conducted exclusively in French or Dutch.
The original dialect of Brussels (known as Brusselian, and also sometimes referred to as Marollian), a form of Brabantic (the variant of Dutch spoken in the ancient Duchy of Brabant) with a significant number of loanwords from French, still survives among a small minority of inhabitants called Brusseleers (or Brusseleirs), many of them quite bi- and multilingual, or educated in French and not writing in Dutch. The ethnic and national self-identification of Brussels' inhabitants is nonetheless sometimes quite distinct from the French and Dutch-speaking communities. For the French-speakers, it can vary from Francophone Belgian, Bruxellois (French demonym for an inhabitant of Brussels), Walloon (for people who migrated from the Walloon Region at an adult age); for Flemings living in Brussels, it is mainly either Dutch-speaking Belgian, Flemish or Brusselaar (Dutch demonym for an inhabitant), and often both. For the Brusseleers, many simply consider themselves as belonging to Brussels.
Religions[edit]
Further information: Religion in Belgium
Religions in the Brussels-Capital Region (2016)
Catholicism (40.0%)
Islam (23.0%)
Protestantism (3.00%)
Other religions (4.00%)
Non-religious (30.0%)
Historically, Brussels has been predominantly Catholic, especially since the expulsion of Protestants in the 16th century. This is clear from the large number of historical churches in the region, particularly in the City of Brussels. The pre-eminent Catholic cathedral in Brussels is the Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula, serving as the co-cathedral of the Archdiocese of Mechelen–Brussels. On the north-western side of the region, the National Basilica of the Sacred Heart is a Minor Basilica and parish church, as well as one of the largest churches by area in the world. The Church of Our Lady of Laeken holds the tombs of many members of the Belgian royal family, including all the former Belgian monarchs, within the Royal Crypt.
The National Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Koekelberg
In reflection of its multicultural makeup, Brussels hosts a variety of religious communities, as well as large numbers of atheists and agnostics. Minority faiths include Islam, Anglicanism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Judaism, and Buddhism. According to a 2016 survey, approximately 40% of residents of Brussels declared themselves Catholics (12% were practising Catholics and 28% were non-practising Catholics), 30% were non-religious, 23% were Muslim (19% practising, 4% non-practising), 3% were Protestants and 4% were of another religion.
As guaranteed by Belgian law, recognised religions and non-religious philosophical organisations (French: organisations laïques, Dutch: vrijzinnige levensbeschouwelijke organisaties) enjoy public funding and school courses. It was once the case that every pupil in an official school from 6 to 18 years old had to choose two hours per week of compulsory religious—or non-religious-inspired morals—courses. However, in 2015, the Belgian Constitutional Court ruled religious studies could no longer be required in the primary and secondary educational systems.
The Great Mosque of Brussels, former seat of the Islamic and Cultural Centre of Belgium
Brussels has a large concentration of Muslims, mostly of Moroccan, Turkish, Syrian and Guinean ancestry. The Great Mosque of Brussels, located in the Parc du Cinquantenaire/Jubelpark, is the oldest mosque in Brussels and the former seat of the Islamic and Cultural Centre of Belgium. Belgium does not collect statistics by ethnic background or religious beliefs, so exact figures are unknown. It was estimated that, in 2005, people of Muslim background living in the Brussels Region numbered 256,220 and accounted for 25.5% of the city's population, a much higher concentration than those of the other regions of Belgium.[better source needed]
Regions of Belgium (1 January 2016)
Total population
People of Muslim origin
% of Muslims
Belgium
11,371,928
603,642
5.3%
Brussels-Capital Region
1,180,531
212,495
18%
Wallonia
3,395,942
149,421
4.4%
Flanders
6,043,161
241,726
4.0%
