A language learners’ forum

Does anyone have any experience with this language (of any sort)? or do you know something interesting about the language- grammatical/ historical/ relationship to other languages/ difficulty/ sound? There seem to be even much less resources than Norwegian (another language I have been recently a bit more than curious about). Any comments?

I have never actively studied Luxembourgish, but having a strong interest in minority languages in Europe, I have read a bit about it and tried to read some stuff in the language. And I admit to having a copy of Parlons luxembourgeois on my Kindle. If you know German you can get quite a bit of the meaning, but it is different enough from standard Hochdeutsch to make it a challenge.

It's basically a standardized version of Mosel-Franconian. Like most German dialects, I find it easier to understand in its spoken than in its written form.
There is always Wikipedia: https://lb.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haapts%C3%A4it
And I have seen some mundane videos on youtube such as expaining the installation of some software etc.

As daegga has already mentioned, Luxembourgish is basically a German dialect that was standardized not so long ago. Actually, it only became an official language of Luxembourg (besides French and German) in 1984. It's quite easy to understand if you know German, but the similarities between the two languages are more apparent in spoken than in written form.

I once had a very amusing evening watching Luxembourgish television, hearing the language for the very first time and understanding everything (yes, language nerdery, guilty!). Basically, it sounds like Cologne dialect interspersed with lots of French loanwords. Declaring it a language in its own right has more to do with politics than with anything else and was triggered by the Second World War. Technically speaking, Luxembourgish has become an "Ausbaudialekt" of German since then, which means it's somewhere between a dialect and a "real" language. It's a little bit like the varieties of Serbo-Croatian becoming languages of their own after the collapse of Yugoslavia.

Be that as it may, I don't know any resources, but knowing German or even Dutch might be a good base for studying the language. Good luck!

Any native speaker would have some knowledge of German obtained at school, but Dutch on its own would help somewhat less. It would still be of use.

Interesting replies, thanks everyone!

I did do some of my own reading too and discovered it was closely connected to German... The reason I've become curious about it is a financial one. As I'm a nurse, I've been looking at the countries in Europe in particular in which nurses get paid the highest or live the most comfortably. Unfortunately France is not one of them, but In Luxembourg (a place i'm not that overly interested in btw- visited once, found it a tad boring, sorry no offence intended, just my personal opinion)... but i could use French there as well as German (if/when i learn it) and would need Luxembourgish to a decent level to stand a chance. They are the highest paid nurses in the world.

I have encountered it (I studied German at Trier, a short distance to the east of Luxembourg, and I sometimes visited the Duchy). I noticed that newspapers there tended to have articles in French, German and sometimes Luxembourgish. The last struck me as being essentially a German dialect not very different from the one spoken in Trier, with some French vocabulary.

PeterMollenburg wrote:Interesting replies, thanks everyone!

I did do some of my own reading too and discovered it was closely connected to German... The reason I've become curious about it is a financial one. As I'm a nurse, I've been looking at the countries in Europe in particular in which nurses get paid the highest or live the most comfortably. Unfortunately France is not one of them, but In Luxembourg (a place i'm not that overly interested in btw- visited once, found it a tad boring, sorry no offence intended, just my personal opinion)... but i could use French there as well as German (if/when i learn it) and would need Luxembourgish to a decent level to stand a chance. They are the highest paid nurses in the world.

Re boring, I watched a bit of Luxembourg TV at the time of worldwide protests over the upcoming Iraq war in February 2003 and the TV news covered the anti-war protest in Luxembourg City for something like 15 minutes. I suspect it made a change from "cat rescued from tree"-type news.
I find Luxembourg's trilingual newspapers fascinating, and I ate a nice pizza there once, but it is hardly a place for a wild night out...

William Camden wrote:

PeterMollenburg wrote:Interesting replies, thanks everyone!

I did do some of my own reading too and discovered it was closely connected to German... The reason I've become curious about it is a financial one. As I'm a nurse, I've been looking at the countries in Europe in particular in which nurses get paid the highest or live the most comfortably. Unfortunately France is not one of them, but In Luxembourg (a place i'm not that overly interested in btw- visited once, found it a tad boring, sorry no offence intended, just my personal opinion)... but i could use French there as well as German (if/when i learn it) and would need Luxembourgish to a decent level to stand a chance. They are the highest paid nurses in the world.

Re boring, I watched a bit of Luxembourg TV at the time of worldwide protests over the upcoming Iraq war in February 2003 and the TV news covered the anti-war protest in Luxembourg City for something like 15 minutes. I suspect it made a change from "cat rescued from tree"-type news.
I find Luxembourg's trilingual newspapers fascinating, and I ate a nice pizza there once, but it is hardly a place for a wild night out...

From a linguistic perspective, I certainly agree, it's exciting. Ater reading more on wikipedia here are some stats for main languages spoken by the population:
Luxembourgish = 55.8%
Portuguese = 15.7%
French = 12.1%
German = 3.1%
Italian = 2.9%
English = 2.1%
Other = 8.4%

So the fact that French is rather high I certainly like... and that German is lower than French I prefer (I aim to learn it and do like it, but French is my 'main' foreign language so far- my all time favourite you could say). That portuguese is spoken by 15.7% is astounding and introduces the strong possibility of learning another rather large world language if I were to ever relocate to Luxembourg. English being low I prefer (too much of it everywhere imo- dont' want a debate on that one, that's just me). Italian I am used to coming across here in Australia... and Luxembourgish, well it's great that a minority language is going so strong. It would be tricky to find resources to get to a decent level but after German I'd imagine it would be much easier (and since there are around 5000 French words in the language also helps).

Why boring? Well it was a short visit of a few days to Luxembourg City which I found didn't hold much excitement for me (I was much younger at the time admittedly- yes yes I have gotten older since then, really don't know how that happened, and frankly i'm quite shocked!- something ought to be done about it!)

Is French spoken natively anywhere in Luxembourg? Or is it a case of the population having a good knowledge of the language due to trade and cultural links with France?