Luxembourg's culture: a national language the state had to build

Why no law is written in Luxembourgish

The law of 24 February 1984 on the language regime did three things in one text. It established Luxembourgish as the national language. It fixed French as the language in which legislative acts and their implementing regulations are drafted. And it gave Luxembourgish, French and German equal standing as administrative and judicial languages, obliging the administration to answer, as far as possible, in whichever of the three a citizen used to ask.

What followed is a division of ground on which each language holds a domain and none holds all of them. French is the sole language of legislation, an inheritance of the hold the Napoleonic Code took on the legal system, and it carries most written official communication: administrative and judicial decisions, passports, road signs, advertising displays. German carries much of the press. The daily with the largest circulation, the Luxemburger Wort, is German-language, and newspapers routinely set a French article beside a German one without translating either. Luxembourgish carries speech. Debates in the Chamber of Deputies are conducted mostly in it, the main radio and television channels build their programming on it, and it is the language Luxembourgers use with each other.

French was the most widely known language in the country in 2018, when 98% of citizens could speak it, and private sector business leaders name it the main working language of their companies at 56%, ahead of Luxembourgish at 20%.

On 1 July 2023 the national language reached the constitution. Article 4(1) states that the language of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg is Luxembourgish and that the law regulates the use of Luxembourgish, French and German. The article settles a question of status. It moves no statute out of French. The language has no standing in Brussels either: Jean Asselborn, then deputy prime minister, rejected the Alternative Democratic Reform Party's demand for recognition as an official language of the European Union in 2005, citing cost and the sufficiency of German and French, and the Chamber of Deputies rejected a similar proposal in 2024.

How a spoken language acquired its spelling

The oldest known text is the Codex Mariendalensis, a poem of nearly 6,000 lines on the life of the thirteenth-century Yolanda of Vianden, published in the early fourteenth century and found at Ansembourg Castle in 1999. Five centuries separate it from the first printed book in the language, Antoine Meyer's poems of 1829.

Until about the Second World War the language was treated as one German dialect among many. What changed that was ausbau, the deliberate construction of a separate standard in vocabulary, grammar and spelling, and the framing of the result as a language with a name of its own rather than as a national variety of German.

Spelling was the hard part, and the first serious attempt failed. The official orthography adopted on 5 June 1946 let speakers of every variety transcribe words as they said them, rejected the German conventions of capitalising nouns, and respelled French loans phonetically, so that bulletin became bültê. It stood too far from the standards people already knew and was not taken up.

What worked came out of a dictionary. The committee compiling the Luxemburger Wörterbuch, published in five volumes between 1950 and 1977, settled orthographic conventions along the way. Those conventions, set out by Bruch in 1955, became the official standard on 10 October 1975 and were reformed on 30 July 1999. Jérôme Lulling then built a database of 125,000 word forms between 2000 and 2002 for the first Luxembourgish spellchecker, and the Zenter fir d'Lëtzebuerger Sprooch published finalised spelling rules in November 2019.

The alphabet is the 26 Latin letters plus three accented ones, and one rule inside it has consequences a writer feels in every sentence. The Eifel Rule deletes a final n in certain contexts, and the deletion is written down rather than left to speech, so wann ech ginn becomes wa mer ginn. Spelling a word correctly means knowing what the next word starts with.

The state now maintains the apparatus. A strategy adopted in March 2017 set out 40 measures, and the law of 20 July 2018 created a commissioner for the language, held since 1 January 2023 by Pierre Reding, and the Zenter fir d'Lëtzebuerger Sprooch, which publishes the spelling and grammar rules and runs the Lëtzebuerger Online Dictionnaire, the official spelling reference. The National Institute for Languages, created by the law of 8 March 2023, certifies competence, and a separate law lets employees take linguistic leave to learn the language.

What a trilingual school asks of a child

Primary school opens in Luxembourgish and switches to German, which is the language in which children learn to read. Secondary school switches again, to French. Proficiency in all three is required to leave secondary school, and English is taught on top of them. A multilingual education programme encourages Luxembourgish and French in childcare from the age of one to four.

Since the school year 2021/2022 Luxembourgish has been a subject in its own right in the fourth year of secondary education, covering the country and society, the language itself, and Luxembourg culture and literature. It is taught as a foreign language in every public international school, and the University of Luxembourg created a master's degree to supply teachers for the new subject.

The demand falls hardest on children for whom none of the three is the language at home. At the 2021 census Luxembourgish was the main language of 48.9% of citizens, Portuguese of 15.4%, French of 14.9% and German of 2.9%, with the rest spread across English, Italian and a dozen others. A child who speaks Portuguese at home learns to read in German and then sits examinations in French. Portuguese has no official status.

Why the language sits on an endangered list

UNESCO added Luxembourgish to its Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger in 2019. Around 400,000 people speak it worldwide and there are at most some 285,000 native speakers, a base too narrow to sustain books, newspapers, television and internet material against the German and French supply that every one of those speakers also reads.

The argument inside the country turns on proportion rather than totals. There were 681,973 permanent residents in 2025, 47% of them foreign nationals, the largest groups being Portuguese at 13.2% of the total population, French at 7.2% and Italians at 3.7%. The language historian Alain Atten holds that the share of speakers matters more than the count, that Luxembourg City runs at roughly 70% foreign residents against 30% Luxembourgers, and that the published percentages leave out the roughly 200,000 cross-border workers present on any working day. Luxembourg: economy sets out how many of the country's jobs those commuters hold.

Actioun Lëtzebuergesch, an association for the preservation of the language, blames French rather than English: French is the language of most official documents and street signs, so an arriving expatriate is pushed towards French instead. When it was announced in 2021 that Luxembourg Airport would make public announcements in French and English only, the association polled and reported that 92.84% of the Luxembourgish population wanted announcements in Luxembourgish.

The government reads the same country differently. A TNS Ilres study in 2018 found the language common to three quarters of the population and to 94% of young people. The counter-argument is that naturalisation inflates the figure, because the Sproochentest certifies only A2 in speaking and B1 in understanding, and knowledge of Luxembourgish became a naturalisation criterion after the ADR's showing in the 1999 election.

Both readings cite the same precedent. Arelerland, historically part of Luxembourg and now in the Belgian province of the same name, spoke Luxembourgish natively well into the twentieth century and has all but lost it to French. The occupation of 1940 pushed the other way, and Luxembourg: history deals with what a census answered in Luxembourgish three times over did to it.

Why the novel arrived a century after the poem

Meyer's poems of 1829 opened a literature that stayed in verse and on stage for most of the next hundred and fifty years. The three writers treated as the classics all worked in that mould: Michel Lentz, who wrote the words of the national anthem Ons Heemecht; Edmond de la Fontaine, who published as Dicks, is counted the national poet and created theatre in Luxembourgish; and Michel Rodange, whose Rénert is a verse fable about Luxembourg society. Batty Weber, who lived from 1860 to 1940, worked as a journalist while writing short stories, novels, plays and poems.

The novel in Luxembourgish came out of the campaign that produced the 1984 law. Guy Rewenig's Hannert dem Atlantik, published in 1985, follows Jhemp Medinger, an unskilled worker in the industrial south, and is treated as the point at which the form arrived. Roger Manderscheid followed in 1988 with a childhood trilogy. Books in Luxembourgish then began selling in quantity, and Rewenig opened a second market with the story collection Muschkilusch in 1990, after which children's writing became one of the strongest categories in the language.

The same decade revived the other two literatures. French-language writing returned through Edmond Dune, Anise Koltz, Jean Portante and Lambert Schlechter, and a German-language generation formed around Jean Krier and Guy Helminger. Koltz, born in 1928, wrote first in German and Luxembourgish and later in French, a career shaped by the three-way choice every writer here makes. Little of the output travels: three languages split an already small readership, and many works assume a reader who knows the country. Comics do better at home, above all De Superjhemp by Lucien Czuga and Roger Leiner.

What Luxembourg puts on the intangible list

The state is secular and recognises nine religions by arrangement, paying some running costs and clergy wages in exchange for a hand in religious administration and appointments. Since 1980 it has been illegal for the government to collect statistics on religious belief or practice, so what is known comes from surveys: a Eurobarometer survey in 2021 found 53% Christian, 46% of them Catholic, and 38% unaffiliated. A country forbidden to count its Catholics keeps an almost entirely Catholic festival calendar.

After UNESCO adopted the convention on intangible cultural heritage in 2003, the Ministry of Culture opened a national inventory. The first four entries, listed in 2008, were the Éimaischen, the Octave in honour of Our Lady of Luxembourg, the dancing procession of Echternach and the Schueberfouer with its Hämmelsmarsch.

Echternach is the one outsiders know. On the Tuesday of Pentecost the hopping procession moves through the medieval centre of the oldest town in the country, documented since the year 1100 and founded on the cult of Saint Willibrord, the monk who founded the abbey there. The church objected to its pagan elements and banned it repeatedly, which failed to stop it spreading across the region and through every social class. It opens in the abbey courtyard with recited litanies, then some 8,000 dancers in 45 groups take over, and it ends in the basilica. Yearly participation averages around 13,000 people.

UNESCO inscribed it on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity on 16 November 2010. The musical art of horn blowers followed in 2020, and three more elements were approved together in December 2023, at the eighteenth session of the intergovernmental committee held at Kasane in Botswana. All three were multinational files, and all three had passed the Luxembourg inventory first.

Fléizen has probably been practised on what is now Luxembourg territory since the fifteenth century.

Buergbrennen lights bonfires on the Sunday after Shrove Tuesday to end the winter. The Éimaischen pottery fair fills Nospelt and the capital's Fish Market every Easter Monday and sells the Péckvillchen, a bird-shaped earthenware whistle. The Octave brings pilgrims to the cathedral for two weeks in the second half of April. The Schueberfouer, founded by John the Blind in 1340, sets up on the Glacis at Limpertsberg around 23 August for about three weeks.

Where the country's art actually came from

Painting here is a nineteenth and twentieth century affair with a stubbornly local subject. Jean-Baptiste Fresez and Nicolas Liez, the most important artists of the nineteenth century, both painted the city and its surroundings. Sosthène Weis produced watercolours of the same city in enormous numbers, in a manner readers of Turner recognise, and Nico Klopp painted post-impressionist landscapes of the Moselle. Joseph Kutter carries most weight: his Expressionist Luxembourg, commissioned for the 1937 World Exposition in Paris, stacks the houses one behind another and sets the fortifications towering above the valley. Claus Cito made the Gëlle Fra, the gilded figure crowning the Monument of Remembrance obelisk raised in 1923 for the Luxembourg soldiers killed in the First World War, and Su-Mei Tse won the Golden Lion at the Venice contemporary art exhibition in 2003.

Photography reaches further than the size of the country suggests, and it does so largely through one emigrant. Edward Steichen, of Luxembourg descent, grew up and worked in the United States, and as head of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York he arranged two donations to the country: a permanent home at Clervaux for The Family of Man in 1964, and the exhibition The Bitter Years in 1967. The Family of Man, mounted in 1955, holds 503 photographs by 273 photographers from 68 countries, arranged in 32 themes. Luxembourg submitted it in 2002 and UNESCO put it on the Memory of the World register in 2003, by which time the Clervaux museum had drawn over 163,000 visitors since opening in June 1994. Gabriel Lippmann, born in Luxembourg, won the Nobel Prize for his work on colour photography.

The institutions holding this material are recent and heavily state-built. The national museum of archaeology, history and art was created in 1946 as the Musées de l'État and runs three sites, among them the Musée Dräi Eechelen on the fortress. The old city carries a World Heritage listing under criterion iv for its old quarters and the fortifications the Austrians of the eighteenth century called the Gibraltar of the North. Luxembourg was the first city named European Capital of Culture twice, in 1995 and again in 2007, when the title covered a cross-border region. The national cultural development plan running from 2018 to 2028 was drafted from January 2016 through 23 workshops with 262 cultural workers and arrived as ten chapters and 62 recommendations.

Who actually performed the country's winning songs

Luxembourg was a founding participant in the Eurovision Song Contest and entered every year from 1956 to 1993 except 1959, before relegation took it out. It won five times between 1961 and 1983 and hosted four times, a record most large countries lack. Of its 38 entries before 2024, nine were performed by Luxembourgish artists, and none of the five winning songs was. Free to enter again from 1995, the country stayed away for nearly three decades and came back in 2024 with an explicit emphasis on music and artists from Luxembourg. A national culture assembled from outside is visible in the trophy cabinet.

The domestic music base is nothing like as thin as that record suggests. The Union Grand-Duc Adolphe, the national federation covering choral societies, brass bands, music schools and folklore associations, represents some 340 societies with over 17,000 individual members, in a country of 690,959 people at the start of 2026. Classical performance runs through the Philharmonie concert hall and the Grand Théâtre, the Rockhal at Belval takes international pop and rock, and Echternach has run the e-Lake electronic music festival every August since 1997.

Film followed a tax decision rather than a movement. A law of 1988 established a special tax scheme for audiovisual investment, some 30 production companies are now registered, and the animated short Mr Hublot won an Oscar in 2014.

What is eaten between two cuisines

Luxembourg cooking sits on the border between the Latin and Germanic worlds and takes from both, with French dishes prominent on menus and German and Belgian cooking behind them. Italian and Portuguese immigration has added a further layer, and most of the native dishes are folk dishes sharing roots with those of neighbouring Germany.

The national repertoire is short and specific. Judd mat Gaardebounen is smoked neck of pork with broad beans, Bouneschlupp a green bean soup, Gromperekichelcher spiced potato pancakes with onion and parsley, deep fried and sold at roadside stands. Éisleker Ham is smoke-cured raw ham sliced paper thin and eaten with fresh bread. Träipen is black pudding, Kachkéis a soft cooked cheese spread, and Quetschentaart a plum tart that arrives with the September fruit. The grilled sausage once sold everywhere as Thüringer had to be renamed once the name became a protected designation reserved to Thuringia, and now goes by Grillwurscht. Luxembourg: travel takes up where the eating happens.

Drink is the older industry. The north bank of the Moselle has made wine since Roman times and produces Riesling, Pinot gris, Auxerrois, Rivaner and Elbling, along with Crémant de Luxembourg made by the champagne method; authentic Luxembourg wine carries the National Mark. Brewing has gone the other way. Over 600,000 hectolitres a year were brewed through the 1970s and 1980s, the peak was over 800,000 hectolitres in 1976, and output fell below 400,000 hectolitres in 2001 for the first time since 1950.

Two statistics about eating here need reading carefully. Alcohol sales per head here run far above the neighbouring countries', and much of it is bought by customers from neighbouring countries and carried out again, so the figure describes a border rather than a habit. The country carries an unusual count of Michelin-starred restaurants per head, behind Japan, which describes kitchens serving a population with a gross domestic product of 147,252 dollars a head in 2025. What Luxembourgers actually cook is the list above.