Volume: 9  Number: 1  Page: 69–128  doi:10.2167/cilp130.0

The Language Situation in Luxembourg1

Kristine Hornera and Jean Jacques Weberb aDepartment of German, University of Leeds, UK and bDepartment of English, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg

This monograph describes the overall language situation in Luxem-bourg, a highly multilingual country in Western Europe, from a language policy and planning perspective. The first part discusses the social and his-torical contexts, including major societal changes and uncertainties about the future, which are bound up with Europeanisation and the accelerated processes of globalisation. It also deconstructs the notions of Luxem-bourgish as a ‘minority language’ and French as the ‘language of prestige’, and describes a two-pronged language ideology that allows for either monolingual identification with Luxem-bourgish or trilingual identification with the languages recognised by the language law of 1984 (Luxembourgish/ German/ French). The second part discusses the trilingual school-system, a system in which large numbers of romanophone students are forced to go through a German-language literacy programme. The third part provides an overview of language spread in the areas of the media and literary writing. The fourth part examines language purism and tensions concerning the standardisation of Luxembourgish, as well as the debates about language requirements for citizenship. The discus-sion shows how language policy scholarship needs to be approached from a multidimensional perspective, that is, by taking into account dynamics on the global, regional and local levels in addition to those at the state level.

Keywords: language policy, language planning, language pedagogy, trilingualism, Luxembourgish

© 2008 K. Horner & J.J. Weber

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