Luxembourgish Standardization

Depicted as the 'youngest Germanic language', Luxembourgish has needed to undergo some measure of standardization in order to warrant its recently acquired status and national prestige. Owing to its high degree of kinship with German, the issue of distantiation from that language has been pervading that process of standardization. The linguistic independence of Luxembourgish from German has been cultivated by different means, as in particular the overemphasis on its Romance heritage, or the valorisation of its archaic forms. In order to lend a democratic dimension to the cultivation of that linguistic distinctness, the imagery of a Luxembourgish 'folk standard', natural and regionally inclusive, has provided the other main source of justification for the puristic choises made throughout the process of feature selection. This book attempts to shed light on the modalities of interaction between the ideology of linguistic distantiation and Luxembourg's language reality. Beside, the modalities of that interaction are placed within the wider perspective offered by the case of standard West Frisian, a linguistic entity likewise largely defined by contrast with a genetically related neighbour and H-language, i.e. Dutch. From a comparison between the practices of language codification observable in Luxembourg and West Friesland and their ideological justification, an ideal model of further standardization for Luxembourgish is tentatively sketched against the background of the current language planning activities of the Luxembourgish norm agencies.