Luxembourg Villages, Towns Have Three Names

Because Luxembourg is a multilingual country, its villages and towns are named in Luxembourgish, French and German, which can make genealogy especially confusing. 

When I started doing Luxembourg genealogy about 45 years ago, I read in an old German-language obituary that my Wester immigrant ancestor was from Bartringen, Luxembourg. I was so excited to learn of my ancestral village, but when I searched for it on a map, I could not find it. That seemed incredibly strange. Only later did I learn that Luxembourg communities all have three names and maps normally use the French version of the name. My ancestral village was Bartréng in Luxembourgish, Bertrange in French and Bartringen in German.

Sometimes the multilingual names for villages are rather close in spelling, such as Bartréng, Bertrange and Bartringen. Others are very different, as in the case of Bascharage (French), Nidderkäerjéng (Luxembourgish) and Niederkerschen (German).

After my first visit to Luxembourg, I learned that the signs at the entrance to a village or town in Luxembourg list the French version of the name on the top of the sign and the Luxembourgish version in smaller, italicized print beneath the French name. The German version of the name doesn’t appear on the sign.

All of this is a reminder of the multilingualism of Luxembourg. The country itself has three spellings of its name: Lëtzebuerg (Luxembourgish), Luxembourg (French and English) and Luxemburg (German). I swear that Luxembourgers are the most intelligent linguists in the world because they can keep all these variations in spelling straight!

Check out this list showing the various spellings of village/town names in Luxembourg, a helpful tool for anyone interested in Luxembourg genealogy.