The Enregisterment of Luxembourgish Standards in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Luxembourg is characterized by a personal language policy in which Luxembourgish, French, German, and German Sign Language are recognized and enregistered as national (Luxembourgish) and administrative languages. Pivotal in such a policy development was the enregisterment of a Luxembourgish voice throughout the nineteenth century as either a bilingual French/German voice (subsuming Luxembourgish under German) or as a gallicized German voice through conflicting ideologies of personhood and nationhood. Through an analysis of policy, media, and linguistics texts from 1830 to 1896, I argue that cross-event linkages between these texts allow for the identification of two distinct ethnometapragmatics. These typify a Luxembourgish voice and enregister the Luxembourgish language as a highly disputed emblem of nationhood. These ethnometapragmatics were speech events that solidified into pathways that characterized nineteenth-century Luxembourg until 1896, when Caspar Mathias Spoo gave a speech in Parliament whose effects slightly shifted these two pathways by redefining the high/low register division through an ideology of democratization.