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The European language world is characterized by an ideology of monolingualism and national languages. This language-related world view interacts with social debates and definitions about linguistic autonomy, diversity, and variation. For the description of border minorities and their sociolinguistic situation, however, this view reaches its limits. In this article, the conceptual difficulties with a language area that crosses national borders are examined. It deals with the minority in East Lorraine (France) in particular. On the language-historical level, this minority is closely related to the language of its (big) neighbor Germany. At the same time, it looks back on a conflictive history with this country, has never filled a (subordinated) political–administrative unit, and has experienced very little public support. We want to address the questions of how speakers themselves reflect on their linguistic situation and what concepts and argumentative figures they bring up in relation to what (Germanic) variety. To this end, we look at statements from guideline-based interviews. In the paper, we present first observations gained through qualitative content analysis.
When we first started the project of looking at minority languages through a linguistic landscape lens, we felt that the visibility of minority languages in public space had been insufficiently dealt with in traditional minority language research. A linguistic landscape approach, as it had developed over the last years, would constitute a valuable path to explore, by looking at the ‘same old issues’ of language contact and language conflict from a specific angle. We were convinced that fresh linguistic landscape data would be able to provide innovative and useful insights into ‘patterns of language […] use, official language policies, prevalent language attitudes, [and] power relations between different linguistic groups’ (Backhaus 2007, p. 11). The linguistic landscape approach, as presented by the different authors in this volume, has clearly proven to be a heuristic appropriate and relevant for a wide range of minority language situations. More specifically, the ideas and analyses in the different chapters do contribute to a further understanding of minority languages and their speakers. They deepen our comprehension of language policies, power relations and ideologies in minority language settings.