Luxembourgish in Brussels? Nee merci
Bonjour, Moien, Hello or even Olá – you never know which greeting you'll get when you walk into a café in Luxembourg. This tiny multilingual country is always buzzing with debates over language hierarchy. Just last week, right-wing MEP Fernand Kartheiser brought this debate to Brussels by addressing the European Parliament in Luxembourgish.
He was quickly interrupted and asked to switch languages. Despite being a national language, Luxembourgish is not an official EU language. Alongside Turkish (official in Cyprus), it's one of only two national languages not recognised as official by the EU.
Luxembourgish is the most widely spoken language at home, work, and school, and it is the native language of half of the population, followed by Portuguese. Yet this only represents around 290,000 people – well below the number of speakers of Arabic or Catalan within the EU, two languages not recognised as EU official languages.
The Luxembourg government could request Luxembourgish to be recognised as an official EU language. However, this will raise translation and interpretation costs, which some view as hard to justify for only six Luxembourg MEPs, all of whom fluently speak at least three other languages.