“So we thought: Okay, let’s give it a go,” says Alyse with a laugh, recalling why she and her husband Theo--who preferred not to divulge their real names--decided to put their three children in Luxembourg’s public schools (local language stream) even though nobody in the family spoke Luxembourgish, German or French. “The other way around--switching from an English school to the local system--would have been harder,” she reasons.
Linguistically speaking, the public system is arguably best-suited to students with Luxembourgish parents. Year one instruction is in Luxembourgish, after which it switches to German, a close linguistic cousin to Luxembourgish; students begin learning French in the second year of Cycle 2, at around seven years old. For the most part, only Luxembourgish parents will be fluent in all three of these languages.
Still, young kids are notoriously spongelike when it comes to picking up languages. Alyse’s children--who are between seven and thirteen years old--can now speak five of them, thanks to their public education and two parents. However, Alyse says, they haven’t really mastered any of the five.
But neither does she regret the decision, since, she says, the public system offers the best route to cultural integration. “My kids were born here and grew up here. The eldest has Luxembourgish nationality. If he were to switch to an international school now--for secondary education--he might lose his Luxembourgish integrity.”
Classique versus général
In Luxembourg’s public schools, children take an exam when they are 11 or 12 years old that, together with their performance in the classroom and the opinion of their teacher, determines which track they get on: the academic (classique) or the vocational (général).
For Alyse, this exam happens far too early in children’s development. “It’s really shocking,” she comments, explaining that, in her native country, students aren’t sorted into similar tracks until about 16 or 17 years old. Even at university back home, she adds, you can completely change track afterwards. “You don’t limit yourself in that system. The doors stay open.”
Given that her eldest had some struggles with the languages, his teacher suggested the général. Alyse and her husband thought he could manage in the classique, however, and went to the school to object. Since the decision hadn’t been finalised, they were able to change it.
Asked what she would have done differently, Alyse mentions getting language tutoring for her children sooner. And she wishes she had had a better sense of the system in the first place; for example, she had underestimated how important that one exam was in determining her son’s future.
Local norms
Speaking five languages at a young age can be cast as a strength or a weakness, but by no means is it unusual around here: a survey done by the National Youth Service found, in 2023, that only one-third (34%) of children four or younger in Luxembourg have a monolingual home environment. Of the children who could speak at the time of the survey, 60% used two or more languages with their parents: French (59%) and Luxembourgish (57%) were on top of the list, followed by English (25%).
These numbers make the country seem like a chaotic salad of languages, but at the same time Luxembourgish does dominate: 49% of the population call it their main language, compared to 15% for Portuguese and 15% for French, according to a 2022 report from the country’s statistics bureau Statec. English comes in at just under 4%.
This article first appeared in the 2024-2025 Paperjam Expat Guide.
