Around 228,000 cross-border workers from France, Germany, and Belgium commute daily to Luxembourg (STATEC, 2023). The often monolingual cross-border commuters face a complex multilingual situation arising through institutional, societal, and individual multilingualism, which mainly involve Luxembourgish, German, French, and English (De Bres & Franziskus, 2019; Mathä et al., 2022; Purschke & Gilles, 2023). To discuss possible consequences of this constellation, this project addresses two research questions: First, this study aims to identify what attitudes cross-border workers hold towards multilingualism and the individual languages used in Luxembourg. Second, this research examines the reasons that motivate these attitudes.

Investigating language attitudes is paramount to understanding social cohesion within the taxonomy of sociolinguistics and to helping developing language policies (Kircher & Zipp, 2022). Previous research in Luxembourg is mainly concerned with the diverse language ideologies of cross-border commuters, ranging from monolingual nationalist ideologies to multilingual ideologies (De Bres & Franziskus, 2019; Franziskus, 2017). These lines of research mostly employed qualitative approaches and found that cross-border workers feel discriminated against and excluded by Luxembourgers’ language choice and language use (De Bres & Franziskus, 2019; Franziskus, 2017). However, the perception varies depending on the country of residence (Franziskus & De Bres, 2015).

With Purschke’s (2015) constructivist REACT model, this project aims to gain insight into cross-border commuters’ perception of the sociolinguistic situation in Luxembourg. Besides, the influence of social and biographical variables is investigated. As a method, language attitudes were measured and analyzed using an online questionnaire. Semi-structured interviews were conducted subsequently for a closer analysis of the elicited attitudes by inquiring about reasons motivating their attitudes and deconstructing discourses about languages and their speakers. The results mainly suggest strong attitudes towards Luxembourgish, French, and multilingualism in general. Nevertheless, the two languages compete, and negative implications of multilingualism emerge when delving deeper into the data. Additionally, a social desirability bias impacts the findings.