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[This is a guest post by June Teufel Dreyer, with an added note by VHM]

Watching a Netflix detective film entitled Capitani with instructions that I could listen in either English or Luxembourgish. Never having heard of the latter, I chose Luxembourgish, discovered it was mostly German with some French (always ‘merci,’ never danke), several words with long vowels like Dutch, a few words that seemed neither (nay for no; dai for das) and some words I didn’t get at all.  Still wondering why Luxembourgish is considered a language, I googled, found that it was actually classified as a language only in the 20^th century.  One has to become fluent to obtain citizenship.

An exception to the old saying that the difference between a language and a dialect is that the former has an army and the latter doesn’t.  (Technically, of course, Luxemburg does have a military, though not enough to make any of its neighbors nervous).

Note by VHM

As I was familiarizing myself with Luxembourgish (also known as Luxemburgish, Luxembourgian; endonym Lëtzebuergesch), I happened upon another small language in the Google Translate stable of hundreds of languages that was unfamiliar to me, also began with "L" and ended with "mb(o)urgish", had 3 or 4 syllables, and seemed transparently Germanic.  That was Limburgish, also Limburgan, Limburgian, Limburgic, East Low Franconian, South Low Franconian, Limburgs, Lèmburgs (Wikipedia; Ethnologue).

I had heard of the small, picturesque country of Luxembourg, so was not too surprised to learn that it had a language.  On the other hand, the only thing I knew about Limburg was that it is the source of the name of a soft, pungent cheese beloved of my father and inherited into my repertoire of favored flavors /aromas / tastes, i.e., Limburger.  The cheese got its name from the historical Duchy of Limburg, but there is no country, much less one with an army, named Limburg.

…refers to a group of South Low Franconian varieties spoken in Belgium and the Netherlands, characterized by their distance to, and limited participation in the formation of, Standard Dutch. In the Dutch province of Limburg, all dialects, despite their differences, have been given collectively a regional language status, including those comprising "Limburgish" as used in this article.

Limburgish shares many vocabulary and grammatical characteristics with both German and Dutch. A characteristic feature of many dialects of Limburgish is the occurrence of a lexical pitch accent (Franconian tone accent), which is shared with the adjacent Central Franconian dialects of German

(Wikipedia)

Selected readings

• "An army and navy" (12/22/18) — with relevant bibliographical references
• "Of dialects, armies and navies", Johnson, Economist *8/4/10)
• Comments to the previous item

May 8, 2025 @ 7:40 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Classification, Language and the military

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