All good things come in threes, so here is the third part of our series on football terminology, focusing on a small country in the heart of Europe where football terminology is influenced by three different languages: Luxembourg.
In Luxembourg, people speak Luxembourgish, German and French. Luxembourgish, or Letzeburgisch, is spoken at home and in families, which is why it’s also used for such things as football, which, according to Bill Shankly, Liverpool FC’s legendary manager, is not just “a matter of life and death…, it is much, much more important than that”.
From a scientific perspective, it’s fascinating to note that, in addition to Anglicisms, words from German and French have also found their way into the Letzeburgish football lexicon. In linguistics, it is generally assumed that, in the long run, only one term can prevail – as with ‘Ecke’ in Germany as opposed to ‘Corner’ in Austria and Switzerland. The Luxembourgers, however, don’t follow this pattern; instead, they sometimes use two terms in parallel, a phenomenon which in linguistics is called ‘duplicates’:
For instance, the football team itself is sometimes called ‘Mannschaft’ and sometimes ‘Ekipp’ (from the French word ‘équipe’). A free kick is referred to as ‘Fräis-touss’ (from German Freistoß) or ‘Coup-franc’. And the person known in English as a ‘referee’ is sometimes called ‘Schiidsrichter’ (very close to the German Schiedsrichter) and sometimes ‘Arbitter’ (from the French ‘arbitre’).