Luxembourg, a multilingual city
I found this post ‘What a bilingual city actually looks like’ by Linguaphiles very interesting and since I live in a multilingual country I thought I would make a Luxembourg edition of it.
Now, it seems like that, at least judging by the examples in the post, in Barcelona some thought is put into how the different languages are used. In Luxembourg things aren’t always that clear.
Here we can see the street signs in the city centre. They are actually very consistently written in two languages - French in capitals at the top, Luxembourgish in italics at the bottom.
On the signs that show important places in the city, all three official languages plus English are represented.
But if you thought: ‘Ah, so far it’s been fairly logical!’, let me introduce Portuguese into the mix. Luxembourg has a lot of Portuguese immigrants and more and more information is now also written in Portuguese.
(Also, I love how they just have a completely different system for the weekdays)
Lastly, we have the map of the bus routes (so far the only transport within the city). This really shows how arbitrarily the different languages are used. Some things are very Luxembourgish, e.g. ‘Biischtefabrik (broom factory), while others are French, e.g. Cathédrale, Merl Parc.
The latter would be different in Luxembourgish, however we also use a lot of French loanwords, so that for instance ‘Gare’ (train station) is the same in both languages.
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