Cómo aprender luxemburgués

Luxembourgish is a small language with a large everyday role: it is the language of the street, the bakery and the football club, while French and German do much of the written work. That makes it unusually easy to hear and unusually hard to practise, because most people switch to French the moment they see you struggle. This page is what to do about that.

Where to start

Learn to greet someone, introduce yourself, count, and order something. Those four cover most first conversations, and they are most of A1 here. Do not start with grammar tables: word order and spelling settle much faster once you have a few hundred words you recognise when they are spoken quickly.

A week that works

Twenty minutes a day beats three hours on Sunday, because the review in this course is built around when you are about to forget something. A week that works: one new lesson, a review round on the other days, and one thing you listen to without understanding all of it.

Listening is the bottleneck

Written Luxembourgish looks reachable long before the spoken language does. It is spoken quickly, and the Eifeler Regel drops final n sounds, so words run into each other in ways the spelling does not show. The cure is volume rather than difficulty: the radio on in the background, the same short news bulletin twice, the listen button on every word here.

Getting people to speak it with you

Say at the start that you are learning and ask them to stay in Luxembourgish. Most people will, and are pleased to be asked: switching to French is politeness, not impatience. A class helps here more than any app, because everyone in the room has agreed not to switch.

The Sproochentest and nationality

Naturalisation as a Luxembourger involves a spoken assessment of Luxembourgish, the Sproochentest, run by the national language institute. This course is not that test, is not a certificate, and has no connection to it — but the A1 to B1 vocabulary here is the ground it stands on. Check the official pages for what is required now.

Where to go besides this course

The large consumer language apps do not teach Luxembourgish, so what is useful is mostly the institutions and the dictionary. Free unless it says otherwise.

• Institut national des langues (INLL) — The state language school, and the body that runs the Sproochentest. Luxembourgish courses at every level, in Luxembourg City and around the country. Courses are paid, and inexpensive.
• Zenter fir d’Lëtzebuerger Sprooch (ZLS) — The state centre for the Luxembourgish language, under the Ministry of Culture since 2018. The official spelling rules live here, with the tools that go with them.
• Lëtzebuerger Online Dictionnaire (LOD) — The Lëtzebuerger Online Dictionnaire: free, official, and with a recording for most headwords. The pronunciation you hear in this course comes from it.
• lifelong-learning.lu — The national training portal. Search it for Luxembourgish courses near where you live, including evening classes and the ones your commune runs.
• RTL Lëtzebuerg — News, radio and television in Luxembourgish. The best free listening there is, and the short bulletins are the right length to play twice.
• Promotion of the Luxembourgish language — The government’s own account of what is being done for the language, and where the official material sits.
• Obtaining Luxembourgish nationality — The official page on obtaining Luxembourgish nationality, including where the language requirement fits into it.

These are other people’s sites. We have no connection to any of them and gain nothing if you use them, which is the point: they are better than us at what they do. Requirements, prices and timetables change, so trust the official page over this one.