Lorraine Franconian ( native name : Plàtt or lottrìnger Plàtt ; French : francique lorrain or platt lorrain ; German : Lothringisch ) is an ambiguous designation for dialects of West Central German ( German : Westmitteldeutsch ), a group of High German dialects spoken in the Moselle department of the former northeastern French region of Lorraine (See Linguistic boundary of Moselle ).
3-540: Viller ( Lorraine Franconian Willer ) is a commune in the Moselle department in Grand Est in north-eastern France . This Arrondissement of Forbach-Boulay-Moselle geographical article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Lorraine Franconian The term Lorraine Franconian has multiple denotations. Some scholars use it to refer to the entire group of West Central German dialects spoken in
6-820: The French Lorraine region. Others use it more narrowly to refer to the Moselle Franconian dialect spoken in the valley of the river Nied (in Pays de Nied, whose largest town is Boulay-Moselle ), to distinguish it from the other two Franconian dialects spoken in Lorraine, Luxembourgish to the west and Rhine Franconian to the east. The German term Lothringisch refers to Rhine Franconian spoken in Lorraine. In 1806 there were 218,662 speakers of Lorraine Franconian in Moselle and 41,795 speakers in Meurthe . In part due to
9-523: The ambiguity of the term, estimates of the number of Lorraine Franconian speakers in France vary widely, ranging from 30,000 to 400,000 (which would make it the third most-spoken regional language in France, after Occitan and Alsatian ). The most reliable data comes from the Enquête famille carried out by INSEE (360,000 in the 1962 census) as part of the 1999 census, but it gives a somewhat indirect picture of
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