Lorraine Franconian

Not to be confused with Lorrain dialect or Alsatian dialect.

"Francique" redirects here. For the Grenadian athlete, see Alleyne Francique.

Lorraine Franconian (native name: Plàtt or lottrìnger Plàtt; French: francique lorrain or platt lorrain; German: Lothringisch) is an ambiguous designation for dialects of West Central German (German: Westmitteldeutsch), a group of High German dialects spoken in the Moselle department of the former northeastern French region of Lorraine (See Linguistic boundary of Moselle).

Lorraine Franconian
Lottrìnger Plàtt
Native to	France
Region	Moselle
Native speakers	(c. 360,000 cited 1962)[1]
Language family	Indo-European Germanic West Germanic Weser-Rhine Germanic Central German West Central German Rhenish Franconian Pfälzisch–Lothringisch Lorraine Franconian
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.

The language border around 1630

Franconian languages area: Central Franconian dialects in green.

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 (in Pays de Nied, whose largest town is Boulay-Moselle), to distinguish it from the other two Franconian dialects spoken in Lorraine, Luxembourgish to the west and Rhine Franconian to the east.^{[citation needed]}

The German term Lothringisch refers to Rhine Franconian spoken in Lorraine.^[2][3]

In 1806 there were 218,662 speakers of Lorraine Franconian in Moselle and 41,795 speakers in Meurthe.^[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, after Occitan and Alsatian).

The most reliable data comes from the Enquête famille carried out by INSEE (360,000 in the 1962 census) as part of the 1999 census, but it gives a somewhat indirect picture of the current situation (see Languages 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]

Bilingual signs

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