Multilingual practices of university students and changing forms of multilingualism in Luxembourg

Abstract

With its own national language, Luxembourgish, and three languages of administration, French, German and Luxembourgish, Luxembourg has long been a very multilingual country. The nature of this multilingualism is now changing, due to the rising proportion of migrants in the country, who now make up 43% of the resident population. The changing demographic profile of Luxembourg is reflected in a diversification of language practices within this already highly multilingual context. This article focuses on one group of people who exemplify these changes, 24 students of diverse national and language backgrounds at the University of Luxembourg. Using data from a language diaries exercise conducted as part of an introductory course on multilingualism, we examine the reported multilingual practices of the students and consider what these language practices reveal about traditional and newer forms of multilingualism in Luxembourg.

Keywords:

• multilingualism
• migration
• language diaries
• multilingual practices
• Luxembourg
• university students

Notes

1. Luxembourg has a two-track secondary education system, where students can go to either the lycée classique (classical secondary school), for a more academically oriented education, or the lycée technique (technical secondary school), for a more vocationally oriented education.

2. http://wwwfr.uni.lu/etudiants/informations_utiles_de_a_a_z/multilinguisme (accessed April 27, 2012).

3. International students made up 2370 (41.6%) of the total of 5700 students in 2012. (http://wwwfr.uni.lu/universite/presentation/chiffres_cle, accessed April 27, 2012).

4. Whereas, in some other parts of the world, the term ‘ethnicity’ would be used here, use of the term ‘nationality’ is a convention in Luxembourg. Although these terms arguably have quite different meanings (one can have a much broader range of ethnic affiliations than passports), we felt that using ‘ethnicity’ would be likely to confuse the students.

5. We thank one of the anonymous reviewers for making this point.

6. Note that Horner (2004) draws a similar conclusion from a comparison between the Luxembourg and Catalan language situations, claiming that ‘as is the case in Catalonia, language currently constitutes the most salient symbol of ethnic group identity in Luxembourg’.

7. Starks and Lee (2010, p. 244) claim that language diaries can be particularly useful as pilots for future ethnographic research. The same could be said about the present research.