Gearing Up for Unified Europe : Luxembourg Guards Its National Identity

Described by one travel guide as a “20th-Century Camelot with toy trimmings,” Luxembourg almost defies belief that it still exists.

With its fairy-tale setting and grand duke, it seems like a remnant of a lost Europe where peasants tilled the land and dukes ruled tiny principalities.

Now, some fear that the European Community’s smallest state, bounded by France, West Germany and Belgium, faces one of its biggest challenges: preserving its national identity after 1992, when the European Community becomes a single, barrier-free market.

As it prepares to celebrate 150 years of independence next year, Luxembourg looks more and more to its own language, Luxembourgish, seen as having been a key to survival in the past and a guardian of future national identity.

Luxembourg’s population is only 380,000, among the European Community’s 322 million. Foreigners make up almost a third of the population, including large numbers of Portuguese immigrants and swarms of foreign bankers and “eurocrats” (Common Market bureaucrats) coming to work in the international banking center or in European Community institutions.

A low birth rate and dwindling numbers of native Luxembourgers mean that statistically “Luxembourg is programed to disappear in a century,” according to one local writer.

That’s why the focus is now on Luxembourgish.

“Before, it was a language for speaking to servants or cattle,” says writer and librarian Jul Christophory, noting that the middle and upper classes preferred to speak French.

But over recent years, a resurgence in the language has produced a range of literature and a few films.

“That is something that was unimaginable 10 years ago. . . . We are starting to explore possibilities of expression and make it say things it has never said before,” Christophory said.

Among themselves , all locals speak Luxembourgish, originally a German dialect but now with many French words. When speaking their own language, Luxembourgers choose from French or German vocabulary to find a word to use--although the latest trend for the intellectual elite is to find an original Luxembourgish word.

Most also speak fluent French and German. The administration is in French and newspapers in German.

However, people are being encouraged to write in Luxembourgish, newspapers print birth, marriage and death notices in the language, and the government and Parliament use it for debates.

The language is also seen as a protection against foreigners here and the pervasive influence of neighboring cultures.

Now 37 miles long and 62 miles wide, Luxembourg was once three times this size, before bigger powers appropriated much of its land.

It survived largely as a buffer state, with neither of the then-big powers, France and Prussia, wanting the other side to control Luxembourg’s strategic fortress.

When it gained independence from Holland in 1839 and was stripped of much of its land, all that was left was a small group of rural Germanic people, using Luxembourgish at home and High German on formal occasions.

Years of attempted domination, first by Prussia and then Germany, helped crystallize a national identity.

In 1984, Luxembourgish was declared the national language. The first dictionary was completed in 1975, and agreement has almost, but not quite, been reached on spelling.

The trilingualism of Luxembourgers is a feature heavily touted to promote the capital as an international banking center.

Luxembourg children begin by speaking their native tongue, but have most primary education in German and secondary education in French.