Lingman Wan

• Doctoral defence: 21 July 2026 at 10 a.m. (Belgian time)
• Online
• Supervisor: Ching Lin Pang
• ​Register by 17 July to receive the link​
• Read the blog: When language becomes infrastructure​

Abstract

This study focuses on Belgium, a federal state profoundly shaped by linguistic division. Historical discussions of Belgium’s language conflicts are by no means rare. Yet in the course of federalization, linguistic nationalism, once overtly confrontational, has gradually sedimented into a state rationality organized around the principle of “language-territory”. Language has thus moved beyond being the core of the earlier conflict between Dutch-speaking Flemings and French-speaking Walloons to become the underlying basis for the territorial division of the state, the organization of communities, and the allocation of rights and resources in Belgium. Linguistic boundaries, in turn, have emerged as the most visible material form of the institutionalization of linguistic nationalism. Against this background, the study asks a central question: how does this language-indexed governing rationality, in the everyday operation of Flanders, continually render abstract linguistic boundaries concrete, and how are these boundaries repeatedly confirmed and reproduced through the routine workings of micro-level social order?

The research is grounded in ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Antwerp, Flanders, and adopts a qualitative anthropological approach. Drawing on interviews and participant observation, it cross-checks narratives across a range of social actors. It also incorporates visual ethnography and elicitation materials to move beyond discursive surfaces and recover the multiple mechanisms through which linguistic boundaries are confirmed in physical space, sensory perception, and lived experiences. The analysis proceeds across three main dimensions: public institutions, the educational sphere, and individual experiences. After clarifying the historical trajectory of intercommunal conflict, the study first examines how administrative systems and cultural apparatuses translate the language-territory principle into practice and entrench it as social common sense. It then shows how schools assume the institutional function of carrying these boundaries across generations. Finally, by shifting to the micro-level of language users themselves, the study reveals how individuals, in the context of Europe’s multilingual reality, continually reaffirm existing boundaries through their everyday linguistic choices and practices.

The dissertation argues that Belgium’s linguistic boundary is not a fixed geographical line separating pre-existing reified communities. Instead, it is a historically sedimented yet continuously enacted infrastructure of boundary-making. At the macro level, legal norms, administrative rationalities, and educational technologies territorialize linguistic differences and render segmented coexistence natural. At the micro level, the boundary is reproduced through everyday processes of navigation and adjustment as speakers, residents, and migrants act and perform along linguistic expectations and social distinctions. The linguistic boundary therefore functions both as the institutional outcome of past conflict and as a mechanism through which the existing order is sustained.