| Lorraine Franconian | |
|---|---|
| Lottrìnger Plàtt | |
| Native to | France |
| Region | Moselle |
Native speakers | (c. 360,000 cited 1962)[1] |
Indo-European
| |
| Official status | |
Recognised minority language in | France |
| Regulated by | No official regulation |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | – |
| Glottolog | loth1238 Lothringisch |
| IETF | gmw-u-sd-fr57 |
 Dialects of Moselle. Those in purple areas are lumped under the term "Lorraine Franconian" when spoken in France. | |
 Luxembourgish, Moselle Franconian & Rhenish Franconian are all classified as Vulnerable by theUNESCOAtlas of the World's Languages in Danger (2010) | |
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 Flag of Lorraine since the 13th century |
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Lorraine in theEU |
Lorraine Franconian (native name:Plàtt orlottrìnger Plàtt;French:francique lorrain orplatt lorrain;German:Lothringisch) is an ambiguous designation fordialects ofWest Central German (German:Westmitteldeutsch), a group ofHigh German dialects spoken in theMoselle department of the former northeasternFrench region ofLorraine (SeeLinguistic boundary of Moselle).
The termLorraine 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 theMoselle Franconian dialect spoken in the valley of the riverNied (in Pays de Nied, whose largest town isBoulay-Moselle), to distinguish it from the other twoFranconian dialects spoken in Lorraine,Luxembourgish to the west andRhine Franconian to the east.[citation needed]
The German termLothringisch refers to Rhine Franconian spoken in Lorraine.[2][3]
In 1806 there were 218,662 speakers of Lorraine Franconian inMoselle and 41,795 speakers inMeurthe.[4]
In part due to the ambiguity of the term, estimates of the number of Lorraine Franconian speakers in France vary widely, ranging from 30,000[5] to 400,000[6] (which would make it the third most-spoken regional language in France, afterOccitan andAlsatian).
The most reliable data comes from theEnquête famille carried out byINSEE (360,000 in the 1962 census) as part of the 1999 census, but it gives a somewhat indirect picture of the current situation (seeLanguages in France for discussion of this survey). About 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 (or used) the language regularly with their own children.[7]
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