Former Federal Secretary of State Theo Francken (N-VA) has raised a hornet’s nest on Twitter by questioning the Dutch-language skills of the next Brussels Secretary of State for Equal Opportunity, Nawal Ben Hamou.
In a tweet on Friday, Francken seemed to cast doubt on Ben Hamou’s knowledge of Dutch, and even her mastery of other skills. “What about the Dutch (skills) of the new secretary of state for Equal Opportunity in Brussels, and all the rest?” he wondered in one of his many daily tweets.
Contributors on his Twitter thread responded that Ben Hamou had studied in Dutch at school in Brussels and that she was known to be bilingual.
Francken, whose French is just grammatically correct, was also reminded by some of the contributors to his thread that some of his tweets in Dutch, his mother tongue, contained grammatical errors, related to the use of the letters “d” and “t” in verb conjugations.
The Brussels Times
