‘Perhaps this is not fiction’: The discursive construction of national and regional identities in Belgium’s public television broadcast hoax on Flemish independence

This article sets out to reveal and evaluate the strength and scope of those units of media discourse that are connoted by identity. More specifically, it seeks to demonstrate which discursive strategies the media adopt in the case of a hoax news broadcast that announced ‘the end of Belgium as we know it’ in order to construct and stage the opposition between Walloon region-building (‘Us’) and Flemish nation building (‘Them’). For this purpose, it will focus on lexico-grammatical choices, co-textual deployment of rhetorical devices and socio-referential correlations. Relating these observations to social theory on national identity (specifically, Anderson’s historical materialist approach and Smith’s work on ethnosymbolism), as well as relevant sociopolitical perspectives, will allow for a demonstration of the ways in which discursive strategies exploit the symbiosis between language as a functional means of communication and as the carrier of a shared set of values to construct national and regional identities.