Should you add Luxembourgish pages?

Why it matters

Most Luxembourg business websites are in French, German and English. Luxembourgish is the language many of your resident customers think in, so the question comes up sooner or later: do we need it on the website too?

There is no single answer. It depends on who your customers are, where they live and how they already write to you. This guide gives you the official figures, a short way to decide, and, if the answer is yes, the smallest useful start. How to add any language to your website (separate addresses, hreflang, language switcher) is covered in Guide 08: Be visible in French, German and English. This guide only adds what is specific to Luxembourgish.

Reference

Who speaks Luxembourgish: the census figures

The 2021 census, run by STATEC, asked residents two questions about language. The first: which language do you think in and know best (the "main language", one answer only). The second: which languages do you usually speak at home, and at school or work (several answers allowed).

Main language: share of the 563,092 residents who answered. Usually spoken: share of the 477,061 residents who answered, several languages per person, so the column adds up to more than 100%. Source: STATEC, census 2021, publication n°8 "Linguistic diversity on the rise".

What the figures say for a business:

• Luxembourgish is the largest single language among residents. 275,361 people named it as their main language, and 292,025 usually speak it.
• Its share is falling as the population grows. As a main language it went from 55.8% in 2011 to 48.9% in 2021, while the population grew from 512,353 to 643,941.
• It is used at home and at work, or not at all. 47.1% of residents speak Luxembourgish in both places; 38.7% speak it in neither.
• French is the language of work. The study calls French "the most widely spoken language on the labour market", and English the second language at work in the capital region.
• It depends on the commune. Luxembourgish is the main language of 25.3% of residents in Luxembourg City, and of 81.2% in Wahl. The study describes the rural communes, especially in the north, as "bastions of Luxembourgish".
• Cross-border workers are not counted. A census only counts residents. The study notes that cross-border commuters shape the languages used in public life, and they do not appear in these figures.

Decide

Do Luxembourgish pages make sense for you?

1. Count the languages of your last 50 enquiries

   Emails, contact form messages, booking requests, notes from phone calls. Write down the language of each one. This is the same exercise as step 1 of Guide 08; if you have already done it, use that list.

2. Answer four questions

   Question	Points towards Luxembourgish pages	Points towards French, German and English first
   Who are your customers?	Mostly residents	Many cross-border workers, expats or international companies
   Where are they?	Rural communes, especially in the north	Luxembourg City and the communes around it
   How do they write to you today?	A good share of your enquiries are in Luxembourgish	Almost none are
   What do you sell?	Local, personal services to households	Services to companies, where French and English are the working languages

   A plumber in the Éislek whose customers ring in Luxembourgish is in the first column. A fiduciary in Kirchberg serving international companies is in the third.

3. Make the call

   • Mostly first column: add Luxembourgish pages, starting small (next section).
   • Mostly third column: make sure your French, German and English pages are complete first, with Guide 08. Come back to Luxembourgish later.
   • Mixed: start with the two pages below and see whether customers use them.

   Either way, Luxembourgish pages are an addition, never a replacement. In the census, 38.7% of residents do not speak Luxembourgish at home or at work, and cross-border customers are not counted at all.

Steps

If yes: a small, correct start

1. Start with two pages

   Your home page and the one service page that brings most of your enquiries. Both translated in full, not just the menu and footer: Google warns that translating only the surrounding template, while the main text stays in another language, makes a poor result. Add more pages once these two are live and checked.

2. Write it with a native speaker, using the official tools

   Do not publish a machine translation without a native check. A native speaker who knows your trade writes or reviews every sentence. Luxembourgish has an official spelling, adopted by the government in November 2019 and published by the Zenter fir d'Lëtzebuerger Sprooch (ZLS), the state's Luxembourgish language centre. These tools from the ZLS help your writer:

   LOD

   The Lëtzebuerger Online Dictionnaire. Luxembourgish words with audio, example sentences and translations into German, French, English and Portuguese. lod.lu

   Spellchecker

   Checks the spelling of words in a Luxembourgish text. Run your page text through it before you publish. spellchecker.lu

   Official spelling

   The rules of the official orthography, as a PDF from the ZLS. The ZLS says they are binding where the state is responsible, such as administrations and schools. zls.lu

   Keep every fact identical to your other languages: the same phone number, prices and opening hours. A wrong fact in one language is a wrong fact AI can repeat.

3. Give the pages their own address and mark the language

   Use a folder, as Guide 08 recommends: for example yourcompany.lu/lb/. In the code of each Luxembourgish page, the language goes in the html tag. The W3C, which writes web standards, advises always declaring the page language this way.

   First line of each Luxembourgish pageCopy

   <html lang="lb">

   lb is the official two-letter code for Luxembourgish in the ISO 639-1 list, the list hreflang uses. Do not use lu: in that list it is the code for Luba-Katanga, a language of Central Africa. And LU on its own is the country, not a language.

   Note: Google says it works out the language of a page from the visible text, not from this tag. The tag helps browsers and other tools; for Google, what counts is that the page really is written in Luxembourgish, menu and text alike.

4. Add Luxembourgish to your hreflang lines

   For a developer, or whoever set up your languages. Guide 08, step 5, explains hreflang. Each page that has a Luxembourgish version lists it alongside the others, and the Luxembourgish page lists all of them back:

   hreflang in the head of all four versions of the home pageCopy

   <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="https://www.yourcompany.lu/fr/" />
   <link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="https://www.yourcompany.lu/de/" />
   <link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://www.yourcompany.lu/en/" />
   <link rel="alternate" hreflang="lb" href="https://www.yourcompany.lu/lb/" />
   <link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://www.yourcompany.lu/" />

   • Only list lb on pages that have a Luxembourgish version. With two Luxembourgish pages, only those two page groups get the extra line.
   • If your website builder writes hreflang for you, add Luxembourgish as a language in its settings and check the result in the page source.

5. Add it to your language switcher

   Name it in its own language, "Lëtzebuergesch", next to Français, Deutsch and English. On the two pages that exist, the link leads to the Luxembourgish version of the same page.

6. Test with your Guide 01 questions in Luxembourgish

   Ask your native speaker to write your Guide 01 questions in Luxembourgish, in the words a customer would use. Ask them in the same assistants as before. In your scorecard, write LB in the Language column and keep these rows apart from the others: compare Luxembourgish with Luxembourgish, month by month.

   scorecard.csv · Luxembourgish rows kept separate

   Date,Question,Has our name?,Language,Assistant,Score (0/1/2),Competitors named,Wrong facts about us,Sites cited,Notes
   2026-10-24,[question 1 in Luxembourgish],No,LB,ChatGPT,0,,,,Before LB pages
   2026-11-24,[question 1 in Luxembourgish],Yes,LB,ChatGPT,1,,,,LB pages live since 2026-11-03

   Illustration with a fictional business.

   Run it first before the pages go live, so you have a starting point, then again once they have been live for a few weeks. One answer is not a verdict, and nobody can guarantee that an assistant will use your new pages.

Check it worked

Confirm the pages are in place

Open your new Luxembourgish home page, right-click and choose View page source. The first line should contain lang="lb", and a search for hreflang should show one line per language, including lb and x-default. Open the French version and check it lists the Luxembourgish page too.

Common mistakes

What usually goes wrong

• Publishing a machine translation unchecked. Mistakes are obvious to native readers, and they are exactly the customers these pages are for. A native speaker reads every sentence.
• Replacing French with Luxembourgish. French is the main language of work, and many customers do not speak Luxembourgish. Add, do not swap.
• The wrong code. lu (Luba-Katanga) or LU (the country) instead of lb. Hreflang needs the language code first; a country code on its own is not valid.
• A Luxembourgish menu over French text. Google reads the visible text, so this is still a French page.
• Mixing the test results. Luxembourgish answers counted in the same total as French and English ones hide what changed. Keep the LB rows apart.