Lorraine Franconian


Lorraine Franconian is an ambiguous designation for dialects of West Central German, a group of High German dialects spoken in the Moselle department of the former north-eastern French region of Lorraine.

Description

The term Lorraine Franconian has multiple denotations. Some scholars use it to refer to the entire group of West Central German dialects spoken in the French Lorraine region. Others use it more narrowly to refer to the Moselle Franconian dialect spoken in the valley of the river Nied, to distinguish it from the other two Franconian dialects spoken in Lorraine, Luxembourgish to the west and Rhine Franconian to the east.
In 1806 there were 218,662 speakers of Lorraine Franconian in Moselle and 41,795 speakers in Meurthe.
In part from the ambiguity of the term, estimates of the number of speakers of Lorraine Franconian in France vary widely, ranging from 30,000 to 400,000.
The most reliable data comes from the Enquête famille carried out by INSEE as part of the 1999 census, but they give a somewhat indirect picture of the current situation. Approximately 78,000 people were reported to speak Lorraine Franconian, but fewer than 50,000 passed basic knowledge of the language on to their children. Another statistic illustrating the same point is that of all adult men who used Franconian regularly when they were 5, less than 30% use the language regularly with their own children.

Bilingual signs