Provinces of Belgium
Most of the provinces take their name from earlier duchies and counties of similar location, while their territory is mostly based on the departments installed during French annexation. At the time of the creation of Belgium in 1830, only nine provinces existed, including the province of Brabant, which held the city of Brussels. In 1995, Brabant was split into three areas: Flemish Brabant, which became a part of the region of Flanders; Walloon Brabant, which became part of the region of Wallonia; and the Brussels-Capital Region, which became a third region. These divisions reflected political tensions between the French-speaking Walloons and the Dutch-speaking Flemish; the Brussels-Capital Region is officially bilingual.
Municipalities of Belgium
Article 4 of the constitution states that each municipality must belong to only one of the four official language areas that were established in 1962–63. In the three officially unilingual language areas, a couple of dozen municipalities in the vicinity of another language area must provide limited facilities for speakers of that other language. As only a law carried by special majorities can change the language status of any municipality, these arrangements have prevented some small municipalities with facilities to be merged in the 1970s, and thus the most minute Belgian municipalities are still found in this group, notably Herstappe with only 84 inhabitants (in 2006).