languages Article German or Not German: That Is the Question! On the Status of the Autochthonous Dialects in East Lorraine (France) Rahel Beyer * and Albrecht Plewnia *   Citation: Beyer, Rahel, and Albrecht Plewnia. 2021. German or Not German: That Is the Question! On the Status of the Autochthonous Dialects in East Lorraine (France). Languages 6: 48. https://doi.org/10.3390/ languages6010048 Received: 7 December 2020 Accepted: 10 March 2021 Published: 15 March 2021 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache, 68161 Mannheim, Germany * Correspondence: beyer@ids-mannheim.de (R.B.); plewnia@ids-mannheim.de (A.P.) Abstract: 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. Keywords: linguistic minority; language status; German; France; Lorraine; language ideology 1. Introduction The prevailing language paradigm in Europe is oriented toward monolingualism and national languages (which in turn are oriented toward nation states) (Giddens 1987; Kamusella 2009, p. 29; Kraus 2008, pp. 89–93). Accordingly, a group of varieties is prototypically recognized as a language if 1. Its standard variety is widespread in a (whole) nation state; and 2. This standard variety is an official language in this state. Furthermore—in general perception—there is only one (national) language per state and per person and vice versa (i.e., each language is associated with only one state) (Kamusella 2009, p. 30). Nonetheless, forms of multilingualism are also acknowledged. They are seen as either migration-induced, acquired through foreign language teaching or grounded in regional variation (“inner multilingualism”, Löffler 2005). From our view, this mindset—which is reflected in and reinforced by public discourse—makes it difficult for laypersons to conceptualize other types of autochthonous multilingualism and to attribute a status to the varieties involved. This holds true for minority languages and especially for genetically closely related varieties outside the main state. In this paper, we want to look at a scenario that is often disregarded by the literature on regional and minority languages, which are the Germanic 1 varieties in East Lorraine, France. Historically and structurally, they “can be clearly defined as belonging to the High German group of languages” (Hughes 2000, p. 114). However, due to the area’s 1 The classification and naming of the autochthonous varieties in East Lorraine prove to be very problematic, which is basically the subject matter of the whole article. For pragmatic reasons, we follow the common grouping under the hyperonym of “Germanic languages”, knowing that this leads to other difficulties: among other things, it hides the fact that the two varieties (Standard German and the dialects in Lorraine) are structurally much more similar to each other than, for example, German and Danish. Languages 2021, 6, 48. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages6010048 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/languages