In 1816, King William I decided  to found three universities in the southern part of the young United Kingdom of the Netherlands. These universities were to be considered, in the light of the King's unifying policy, as instruments to strengthen national unity. One of them is located in French-speaking territory: the University of Liège.

Portrait de Johannes Kinker,  gravure de 1825

The University of Liège was the very first university outside the Dutch-speaking world to be endowed with a chair of Dutch. The first professor to occupy it was the illustrious poet and philosopher Johannes Kinker, who left Amsterdam for Liège in 1817. This fervent defender of North-South unity taught his students Dutch language and literature, and remained in post until the Belgian Revolution in 1830, and.

After his forced departure in 1830, Kinker’s position was entrusted to one of his former students, Jean-François-Xavier Würth. The linguistic policy of the young Kingdom of Belgium condemned the study of Dutch to a precarious state of survival. This only changed on 10 April  1890, when all Belgian universities saw the creation of a new Department of Germanic Philology. This Department focused on the study of Dutch, English and German languages and literatures. Since 2002, it has also been possible for students to combine Dutch with a non-Germanic language at the ULiège, namely Arabic, Italian and Spanish.

In 2014, some members of the Dutch Studies section at the ULiège devoted a book to the rich history of their discipline: Tweehonderd jaar neerlandistiek aan de Université de Liège: Een geschiedenis van de oudste extramural leerstoel Nederlands (ed. Acco).