French in Belgium

The aim of this research is to study the French language used in Belgium, to describe the linguistic situation and some peculiarities of the language there, and to compare it with French language used in France. The author lived in Belgium for nearly six years and compared her experience of the differences between the French language in Belgium with the one used in France. To explore her impressions, she has studied and analysed different sources on the topic and summarised the most important differences. The research is divided in two parts. One gives more general information on Belgium, describes the history of the territory and the linguistic situation of the country to help understand the situation of the French language there. The other, more important part on the language itself describes the phonetic, morphological, syntactic and lexical particularities of Belgian French. The basic conclusion of this paper is that Belgian French is slightly different from French used in France but the differences are not great enough to make understanding between the two nations difficult