Conjectural outcomes of the passage of a recently proposed constitutional amendment to make English the official language of Texas may be compared to the actual linguistic situation in Belgium. Following the revolt led by French-speaking Walloons in 1830, French was used for all national laws and decrees in Belgium as well as for secondary and university education. The Flemish sought to redress the linguistic imbalance, however, and a series of laws passed throughout the 1930s mandated that the nation would be of two tongues, although the people as a whole would not be bilingual. In 1962-63, the enactment of the Linguistic and Education Laws established permanent linguistic boundaries. Major libraries have had great difficulty coping with the resultant linguistic tension, both in terms of achieving international cooperation and obtaining government funding, which is allocated by region and cannot be combined for joint projects. An examination of the effects of the language dispute on the Catholic University of Louvain, the public library of Brussels, and the Royal Library of Belgium points out the problems presented by Belgian linguistic regulations. Belgium is living proof that language frontiers are not natural and that they bring more harm than protection where they are artificially erected. (KM)