All Greek to them

If you are one of many who has incredulously endured a funeral conducted by a minister of religion for a dead person of known no faith, spare a thought for the people of Belgium, where the language feud (Dutch vs French) means that if you’re a French speaker in a Flemish suburb of Brussels, your dead person’s funeral will be incomprehensible.

This is from the Wall Street Journal:

French-speaking Sylvia Boigelot is still upset that in 2006, her father’s funeral, in the northern suburb of Vilvoorde, was in Dutch, in accordance with a local ordinance that all church services be in the language. “There were people who had known him all his life who couldn’t understand a word,” she says. “And it happened with my grandmother, too.”

Read the entire story here.