Luxembourgish

Luxembourgish (Luxembourgish Lëtzebuergesch, French Luxembourgeois, German Luxemburgisch), the native language of around 280,000 inhabitants of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, and of a now diminishing number of speakers in its border areas with Belgium (Arlon; Saint-Vith), France (Thionville), and Germany (Bitburg; Trier). It shares official language status in Luxembourg with French and German. Luxembourgish is also spoken in the United States, around Dubuque (Iowa) and Rollingstone (Minnesota), where it survives as the legacy language of Luxembourgers who emigrated to the United States during the latter part of the 19th century. A variety of Luxembourgish also survives in Transylvania (Romania), where Luxembourgers settled in the 12th century.

In Roman times, the languages in use in the Grand Duchy were Celtic and Gallo-Romance. These were gradually displaced by the German spoken by Franks who invaded the area in the 4th and 5th centuries ad. However, the later attachment of Luxembourg to Burgundy, Spain, France, Austria, and the Netherlands ensured that the Franconian-German of Luxembourg developed largely in isolation from the German spoken in Germany itself. These differences became stronger when the Grand Duchy became independent from the Netherlands in 1839, after which a national identity quite separate from that of the surrounding countries began to emerge. This assumed its present-day form during the Nazi-German occupation of Luxembourg from 1940 to 1944, resistance to which ensured that Luxembourgish had by the end of World War II become the universal spoken language of Luxembourg.

In writing, however, progress was slower and, as in previous centuries, French and German have prevailed in this sphere, although joined increasingly since the Luxembourg Languages Act of 1984 by Luxembourgish itself.

The basic structure of Luxembourgish is still that of Franconian German (of the Moselle), although phonology, morphology, and lexis combine to make the language unintelligible to the majority of Germans, as well as to speakers of Dutch or Flemish. The strongly independent dialects of Luxembourgish have also been levelling out since about the 1890s in the central region of the Grand Duchy and have produced a general variety, or koine, of the language. This is the variety now most frequently found in writing.

Various spelling systems for Luxembourg emerged in the 19th century. The official system of today is that devised for the Luxembourgish-German dictionary (Luxemburger Wörterbuch; 1950-1977 and revised in 1999). The base is largely German, with some concessions to French. A completely new orthography, based on phonetic principles, was introduced in 1946 but rapidly fell out of use because of the need in Luxembourg schools to teach literacy through the medium of Standard German.

In view of the establishment of major institutions of the European Union in Luxembourg, and because of the presence of a large number of cross-border workers and foreign residents there (162,285 at the census of 2001), French is increasingly becoming the language of first spoken and written contact in the Grand Duchy. Nevertheless, Luxembourgish remains the primary spoken language of communication between Luxembourgers, while German predominates in newspapers and French in official documents. No section of the native Luxembourg population is, however, German-speaking, nor is any section French-speaking.