Belgium is a bilingual country where upheavals are occurring after centuries of foreign-language domination. Flemish, the inherited language of northern Belgium, is rapidly gaining social, political, legal and educational equality with the French spoken for so long as the official language of the ruling class. The language of schools is determined by geographic locality as the Flemings' pride in their language strengthens and the country becomes more strongly linguistically divided. Strong French-Flemish antagonisms make language the major political issue in Belgium today. (CK)