A sketch with the best-known Swiss tongue twister

[Philippe Verdy via Unicode]

Apparently you just trust Wikipedia that uses old sources.

Very poopulated area does not mean it is populated by native speakers.
There were lots of migrants that never spoke anything than just standard
French or French slightly "creolized" with foreign languages (but these
adapations are also disappearing in younger generations of people born in
France from migrants). The "Francique" is not so popular, much less than
Alsatian (Alsace is very densily populated too) and Francique" is not the
same as Alsatian and doest not have the same mevel of protection by
cultural relation institututions (there's no national support at all only
regional initiatives or initiatives taken by municipalities to support
schools, and some museums or local universities with linguistic study
branches).

Apparently you've never been in France: regional languages have low levels
of support (lower than the support for English or Standard German or
Spanish in higher levels of education, or even Arabic, Latin and Hebrew,
sponsored by private educational institutiuons where a minimum "trunk" for
standard French is still mandatory for most domains).

I really doubt you can find 400,000 speakers of Francique in Lorraine,
except in a very narrow band near Luxembourg in rural areas in an aging
population. I've lived and worked in Nancy and Metz, and in fact almost
never heard any word in that language, only French and few reginal words.

On the opposite the Alsatian language (French Allemanic) is very vivid in
Alsace (including in Strasbourg), and not correlated with the Allemanic
languages of Switzerland and far enough from standard German to be
distinguished.
.

2018-03-10 20:33 GMT+01:00 Arthur Reutenauer <
arthur.reutenauer at normalesup.org>:

> > The dialect of Lorraine with the  large number of speaker is not the one
> > you think about, yes it is a Romance/Oïl language and not Germanic at
> all.
>
>   You are not reading what I write, so you can’t know what I’m thinking.
>
> > The one you are refering to is only in a very small tiny part of Lorraine
> > and almost extinct.
>
>   Yes, and that’s the language Philip was talking about, reportedly
> called Plattdeutsch by French speakers.  What’s your source for “almost
> extinct”?  Ethnologue 20th ed. has 400,000 speakers (2013), even
> accounting for possible exaggerations that’s hardly extinct.  The “very
> small tiny part” where it’s spoken – 3,300km² according to The Dialects
> of Modern German (Charles Russ ed., Routledge 1990) – is very populous
> because of the former mining industry.
>
> > You are confusing it with the "parler lorrain" (as I said, "Lothringer
> > Platt", part of "Francique" is nearly extinct in Lorraine, this is not
> the
> > case of the "Parler lorrain", also known in Belgium as "Gaumais" and very
> > near from "Wallon").
>
>   You are condescending and your pseudo-erudition gets in the way of the
> conversation.  Nobody except you mentioned Romance dialects, you just
> drifted there on your own.
>
>         Arthur
>
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