About Opentopia
Opentopia Directory Encyclopedia Tools

Luxembourgish language

Encyclopedia : L : LU : LUX : Luxembourgish language

 

Luxembourgish, Luxemburgish, or Luxembourgian (Luxembourgish: Lëtzebuergesch, French: Luxembourgeois, German: Luxemburgisch, Walloon: Lussimbordjwès) is a West Germanic language spoken in Luxembourg. It was proclaimed one of the three official languages of Luxembourg in 1984.

There are about 300,000 people who speak Luxembourgish worldwide.

Contents

Language family

Luxembourgish belongs to the West Central German group of High German languages, and is the primary example of a Moselle Franconian language.

Dialectology

Within Luxembourgish

There are several distinct dialect forms of Luxembourgish including Areler (from Arlon), Eechternoacher (Echternach), Kliärrwer (Clervaux), Minetter, Miseler (Moselle), Stater (Luxembourg city), Veiner (Vianden) and Weelzer (Wiltz). Further small vocabulary differences may be seen between even small villages.

Within the High German family

There is no distinct geographic boundary between the use of Luxembourgish and the use of other closely related High German dialects; it instead forms a dialect continuum of gradual change.

The official standing of Luxembourgish in Luxembourg and its widespread use there do mark it out as a separate language as opposed to a mere dialect of German, however.

Standard Luxembourgish

Increasing mobility of the population and the dissemination of the language through mass media such as radio and television are leading to a gradual standardisation towards a "Standard Luxembourgish" which has been labelled koine.

Written Luxembourgish

The first major orthography of the language was produced in November 1976 by Rei vun Uleef, and was slightly altered again in 1999.

Written Luxembourgish often shows a marked influence from High German in syntax and idiom and often strikes the fluent reader of German as essentially pure German disguised as a foreign language. It seems that the idea of how to properly write in Luxembourgish is still heavily dependent on normative German grammar. In this respect, Luxembourgish does come nearer to being merely a German dialect than does Dutch, which is also obviously related to German but markedly more divergent from that language in syntax, word order and idiom.

Intelligibility with surrounding languages

It is relatively easy for German speakers to understand, especially to read, Luxembourgish, but more difficult to speak it properly because of the French influence. Even literary German, as it is written in Luxembourg, tends to include lots of French words and phrases.

Morphology

Nouns

The grammatical case of a word is shown mainly in Luxembourgish through the articles den/en, the demonstrative and possessive pronouns e.g. mäin, dësen, keen, and by attributive adjectives.

Luxembourgish utilises three cases - the accusative case (which also functions as a nominative case), the dative case and the genitive case - the true nominative case is only seen in a few nominal phrases such as der Däiwel and eiser Herrgott.

The genitive case in Luxembourgish is normally expressed through a use of the dative in a phrasal expression such as dem Mann säi Buch - lit. "to the man his book", i.e. the man's book. This is known as a periphrastic genitive, and is a phenomenon also commonly seen in dialectal and colloquial German.

Luxembourgish distinguishes between singular and plural objects, but does not distinguish gender for plurals.

Luxembourgish demonstrates three grammatical genders - masculine, feminine and neuter. As in German this corresponds where possible to biological gender, but may be affected by suffixes e.g. Meedchen (girl) is neuter because of the diminutive suffix -chen (c.f. German das Mädchen, also neuter). Where there is no biological gender, the grammatical gender of a word is largely arbitrary, although may again be determined by suffixes.

Adjectives

Luxembourgish morphology recognises two types of adjective : attributive and predicative. Predicative adjectives are placed after the noun, and receive no extra ending:

Attributive adjectives are placed before the noun they describe, and change their ending according to the grammatical gender and number: Interesting to note is how the definite article changes with the use of an attributive adjective: feminine d goes to déi (or di), neuter d' goes to dat, and plural d' changes to déi

The comparative in Luxembourgish is formed analytically, i.e. the adjective itself is not altered (compare the use of -er in German and English; tall - taller, klein - kleiner). Instead it is formed through the auxiliary méi: e.g. schéin - méi schéin

The superlative is formed with am+ -sten: e.g. schéin - am schéinsten Exceptions to these rules include the common words

Syntax

Word-order

Typical sentences in Luxembourgish have the SVO word-order, with the subject preceding the verb which is followed by the object: e.g. Ech iesse Kuch - I eat cake.

If, however, at the start of the sentence there is an adjunct, then the verb precedes the subject: Muer iessen ech Kuch. This phenomenon is called "V2 word order" or "Verb Second", because the main, finite verb always occupies the second position in the sentence.

In subordinate clauses we see the word-order SOV - the verb is moved to the end of the sentence: e.g. datt ech Kuch iessen - ...that I eat cake (lit.: that i cake eat).

Vocabulary

Luxembourgish has borrowed many French words. For example, the name for a bus driver is Buschauffeur (also Dutch), which would be Busfahrer in German and Chauffeur de bus in French.

Some words are different from High German but have equivalents in German dialects. An example would be the word potato, which is Gromper in Luxembourgish, but pomme de terre in French and Kartoffel in High German. Other words are exclusive to Luxembourgish, for example the word for "Match", which is "Fixfeier".

Selected common phrases

Neologisms

Neologisms in Luxembourgish include both entirely new words, and the attachment of new meanings to old words in everyday speech.

The most recent neologisms come from the English language in the fields of telephony, computer science and the Internet.

The doctoral thesis of Jérôme Lulling demonstrated the lexical creativity of Luxembourgish in the language of emails, chat-rooms and texts; this was particularly revolutionary, as the language had been thought of previously as somewhat moribund in this regard.

Recent neologisms in Luxembourgish include

Alphabet

The Luxembourgish alphabet consists of the 26 Latin letters plus three modified letters: é, ä, and ë.

Usage

In Luxembourg

Standard German is called "Däitsch", or sometimes "Preisësch" (Prussian, which has slightly xenophobic undertones) in Luxembourg. Its most common uses are in Luxembourg's newspapers, and in primary school. The main administrative language in Luxembourg is French. Luxembourgish is used by all the Radio Stations in Luxembourg and is spoken by most of its citzens.

Outside Luxembourg

Luxembourgish is also spoken in small parts of the surrounding countries of Belgium (in the Province of Luxembourg near Arlon), France (in small parts of the Lorraine) and Germany (around Bitburg and Trier). Since the Second World War, however, the language has not been taught in these countries, with the result that use of Luxembourgish is largely restricted to the older generations.

Furthermore, the language is spoken by a few descendants of Luxembourg immigrants in the United States, and a closely related variety is spoken by emigrants to Transylvania, Romania (Siebenbürgen).

Academic projects

Between 2000 and 2002, the Luxembourgish linguist Jérôme Lulling compiled a lexical database of 125,000 word forms as the basis for the very first Luxembourgish spellchecker (Projet C.ORT.IN.A).

The LaF (Lëtzebuergesch als Friemsprooch – Luxembourgish as a Foreign Language) is a set of four language proficiency certifications for Luxembourgish and follows the ALTE framework of language examination standards. The tests are administered by the Centre de Langues Luxembourg which is a member of the ALTE.

See also

Books

In English:

In French: In German:

External links

[ {{{1] of Wikipedia

 

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.

Search Titles
0123456789
ABCDEFGHIJ
KLMNOPQRST
UVWXYZ?

E-mail this article to:

Personal Message: