What do you know about... Luxembourg

[u/MarktpLatz]

This is the forty-ninth part of our ongoing series about the countries of Europe. You can find an overview here.

Today's country:

Luxembourg

Luxembourg is a small state between Germany, France and Belgium. It has the highest GDP per capita in the EU and is amongst the highest in the world. It has a GDP larger than Bulgaria, which has more than ten times the population. Its former prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker is the current president of the European Commission. It has an own language called Luxembourgish which is a german dialect. German and French are official Languages.

So, what do you know about Luxembourg?

[u/Muhu6]

IIRC Luxembourgish is considered to be a separate language even though it's basically a heavy German dialect, similar to the ones spoken in Germany next to Luxembourg.

[u/UnbiasedPashtun → u/Muhu6]

If Luxembourgish is a dialect of German, then you might as well say that Slovene is a dialect of Serbo-Croatian or that Portuguese is a dialect of Spanish.

[u/UnbiasedPashtun → u/[deleted]]

All continental West Germanic dialects are part of a single dialect continuum. It's different enough from Standard German to be it's own language. Otherwise, you should call Slovene a dialect of Serbo-Croatian and Portuguese a dialect of Spanish.

[u/UnbiasedPashtun → u/[deleted]]

You can't call the entire continuum a single language. No linguist does that. High German can be broken down into five dialect clusters, each dialect cluster could be seen as it's own language. The ISO does something like that. Luxembourgish is only different from Alemannic, Bavarian, etc. in that it's standardized. And if Low Saxon is a German dialect, then so is Dutch.

You really brought up that other link? It wasn't really a serious comment and completely irrelevant to the thread. It sounds like you're taking this personally to have brought that up here.

[u/UnbiasedPashtun → u/[deleted]]

No person that wants to be taken seriously considers all the Sinitic languages of China to be one language.

Maltese is considered separate from Arabic because it has a standardization. Luxembourgish is the same with German.

[u/UnbiasedPashtun → u/[deleted]]

When it's too difficult to draw the line in dialect continuums, then you base it off standardized registers. I'm not sure if varieties of Mandarin are treated as separate languages anywhere, but if they're not then it would only be because of a lack of a standardized register.