Luxembourg: a segmented, multilingual Job Market

Luxembourg is a small, but very dynamic country. In the last 100 years, the population has more than doubled, mainly because of immigration. The proportion of foreigners rose from 3% in 1871 to 46% in 2015. Currently people from 170 countries live in the Grand Duchy. In addition to that, about 40% of the workforce are cross-border commuters from France, Belgium, and Germany. This has an impact on the country’s language situation. At least until the 1980s Luxembourg was mainly trilingual. French was the language of legislation and administration, German was the main language of the newspapers, and Luxembourgish was the main spoken language. Today, the traditional trilingual situation is being replaced by a more complex multilingual situation. Because of a lack of data, this change could not be analysed in detail until recently. To close this gap, the National Statistics Office STATEC included two language related questions in the 2011 census questionnaire: Which language do you know the best? Which languages do you speak on a regular basis at home, at school and at work? This data allows first-of-its-kind analysis into the complexity of the Luxembourgish language situation. After a short introduction into the language situation in Luxembourg in general, the presentation will focus on the language situation at work. Our analysis will show strong correlations between languages and occupations reflecting a split of the Luxembourg labor market in different segments: English dominates in high skilled jobs in the private sector, whereas Portuguese is the main language in low skilled jobs in the private sector. Luxembourgish is the main language in the public sector, while French is the vehicular language in both sectors. This highlights the importance of learning the “right” languages in Luxembourg.