When the language bonus becomes an onus : a Belgian case study

Belgian public servants are entitled to a language bonus, ranging from €20 to €110 per month, when they need to use two official languages, mainly Dutch and French, in their jobs. Some of the employees (window clerks) of a state-owned, public service company (company X) receive this bonus, but only those who work in Brussels, because it is an official bilingual area (French/Dutch). To get an insight into the language practices and beliefs of their Flemish colleagues, we analysed the answers of a survey study of 129 participants working in the monolingual area (Dutch). The language bonus is a source of dissatisfaction for clerks working in monolingual regions, such as Antwerp, because they also need to be multilingual to perform their jobs, but do not receive the bonus. The results indicate that there is a discrepancy between the language policy of Belgium (the language laws) on the one hand and the policy of company X and the language beliefs and practices of the clerks on the other. We conclude our article with a discussion about the language bonus and make an assessment about expenditure on it in Belgium, which we estimate at €51 million per year. We argue that the bonus has to be viewed as a language management strategy and thus has to be evaluated regularly to become fully effective.

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