Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Reading in Luxembourgish

Although most of Daphne's school work is in German and French these days, they do still work on a bit of Luxembourgish most weeks.  It's one of Luxembourg's three official languages, after all!  Daphne must read this story tomorrow at school "with no mistakes."

(if you are getting this post via email, you may need to click through to the actual post to see the video)


Luxembourgish isn't often written, but when it is, it looks like this:

What she's reading
It is often said that Luxembourgish is a dialect of German (but it's generally accepted that this is not polite to say to a native Luxembourger's face.)  To me as a monolingual foreigner, it sounds like a sort of soft German with some French thrown in, and looks like a combination of Dutch and German.

Just for fun, I typed a few of the words from the story into Google translate to see what came up as the "detected language."  Results:

iwwerall - Welsh
iwwerhieflech - German (but it said Afrikaans up until I finished typing it)
nogaang - Afrikaans
Kakiquetschen - German
Lektioun - Haitian Creole
virgeholl - Afrikaans
esou - Haitian Creole
héije - Bosnian (?!)
bliwwen - Welsh

Afrikaans is like Dutch, so I'll buy that.  Haitian Creole is sort of like French, I guess?  Welsh is…uh...

Anyway, I don't get many blog comments these days except for spam, so I thought it might be fun to solicit some this time.

Fellow foreigners: What does Luxembourgish sound like to you?  What does it look like to you?

Native Luxembourgers or fluent Luxies: how's Daphne doing?  Are you offended if people call Luxembourgish a dialect of German?  Have you ever been to Haiti!?!

Please leave a comment!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow, Rosie, I would love to, but I just can't comment intelligently on any of your questions. Please forgive this poor monolingual American!! (I could comment if you were asking about American Sign Language, though...)

-Rachel Anne

Anonymous said...

Hi, my kids have not been taught any luxembourgish since starting school in September (cycles 2.1 and 2.2) although they have picked up a small amount from the playground and general class chat. I wonder if they have that to look forward to in cycle 3? I'm having a hard enough time keeping up with their german and french! To me, written luxembourgish looks like a mixture of Dutch and German.
Keep up the great work rosie, I always love reading your blog
Jen x

Anouk said...

Hello :)
Ok, I'll leave my first comment...
Do you really want to know how Daphné is doing?
She reads perfectly and has not the slightest accent. Actually I think that she reads better than most Luxembourgers, says a native...

Anonymous said...

As being Flemish, simple everyday Luxembourgish is not that difficult to understand. Luxembourgish. To me it is a mix of French and German, spoken with a flemish (Limburg) accent...lol...Your daughter is doing great!!