Lebendiges Letzeburgisch – sterbendes Elsässisch? Regionale Identitäten, NS-Besatzungszeit und Sprachpolitik nach 1945

Abstract

While today nearly all autochtonous inhabitants of Luxembourg do speak Luxembourgish, a Westgerman dialect, nearby in Alsace only 43% of the population and 12% of those under 30 years are using the Alsatian idiom, another German dialect spoken there since early medieval times. For Alsace, it has been argued that this situation was above all a consequence of the brutal politics of Nazi occupation during the Second World War, leading to a deep alienation from everything that had to do with Germany after 1945. But in Luxembourg, Nazi occupation – including forced recruitement for the Grosdeutsche Wehrmacht – was no less cruel. This essay is looking for other explanations for the different linguistic developments of the two regions, one of them a small but souvereign state with historical connections to both Germany and France, the other one a weak province with little political skills in the high centralist French nation-state, who for decades after 1945 did all in a Jacobean tradition, especially in school policy, to let the Alsation native language of the population die and to replace it with the language of the “united and indivisible” French Republic.