Melanie Wagner
University of Luxembourg

German at secondary schools in Luxembourg: a first, second or foreign language?

Keywords: German in Luxembourg, teaching German, language policy and planning, Luxembourgish German

This paper will present some data gathered as part of a larger project run by Wini Davies (Aberystwyth), Eva Wyss (Basel) and Melanie Wagner (Luxembourg). The project as a whole investigates the norm awareness and norm knowledge of secondary school teachers and their role as authorities on that same norm in Germany, Switzerland and Luxembourg. On the basis of data collected from teachers through questionnaires we aim to throw light on teachers’ practice in secondary-school German classes in these three countries where German plays an important role in the core curriculum. With German being a pluricentric language having more than one national norm (Ammon et al. 2004), it is part of a very different sociolinguistic constellation in each country and in this paper, the focus will lie on the situation of German in Luxembourgish secondary schools.

Luxembourg is not considered a full centre in the pluricentric model (Ammon et al. 2004: XXXIV) but a half centre with no recognized national variety (Ammon et al 2004: XLVIII). In the Language Law of 1984, German is defined as one of the three official languages in Luxembourg, next to the national language Luxembourgish, and French with the functions of an administrative and a judicial language. German holds the functions of an administrative language and it is the language used for alphabetization and teaching at school (Wagner 2010) – due to its prevailing role at school, German is spoken and written by all Luxembourgers.

An analysis of a selection of language policy and planning documents for the teaching of German in Luxembourg as well as statements on the teaching of German made by school officials has shown that even though German plays a prominent role in Luxembourgish schools, it is unclear whether it is regarded and/or taught as a first, second or foreign language. In this particular paper I will try to establish what the situation, function and status of the German language in the Luxembourgish classroom is by further analyzing these documents and comparing them to some of the questionnaire data collected to gain an insight in language planning processes. On the basis of the collected data, the paper will moreover discuss the teachers’ norm knowledge, by looking at their use of reference works and at two grammatical constructions and comparing their descriptions in the codex with those made by the teachers. This analysis will help to address the question whether a Luxembourgish norm of German exists and is accepted but so far has not been recognized by the codifiers as no national variety of German has been defined for Luxembourg.

References:

Ammon, Ulrich et al. (2004) : Variantenwörterbuch des Deutschen.  Berlin: De Gruyter.
Wagner, Melanie (2010): Lesenlernen: die Situation in Luxemburg. In: Lutjeharms, Madeline & Claudia Schmidt (Hgg.) Lesekompetenz in Erst-, Zweit-, und Fremdsprache. Tübingen: Gunter Narr