The census of 8 November 2021 asked residents which languages they usually speak, at home, at school or at work. The STATEC publication RP2021 no. 8, Une diversité linguistique en forte hausse (December 2023) gives the answer: 61.2% speak Luxembourgish, 50.8% French, 25.7% English, 22.5% German, 19.8% Portuguese, two languages per person on average. The country had 690,959 inhabitants on 1 January 2026, 46.6% of them foreign nationals. A campaign served in a single language therefore reaches, at best, half of the residents in the language they use every day. The census does not say which language each person understands; it says which ones they use, and where.
The facts
- Table 6 of the publication (multiple answers, 477,061 respondents): Luxembourgish 61.2%, French 50.8%, English 25.7%, German 22.5%, Portuguese 19.8%, Italian 5.8%, other languages 18.0%. Between 2011 and 2021, the number of usual English speakers rose by 27% and that of other languages by 55%; German fell by 24%.
- Main language, the one people know best, single answer (table 1): Luxembourgish 48.9% against 55.8% in 2011, Portuguese 15.4%, French 14.9%, English 3.6%, German 2.9%. The number of people declaring English as their main language doubled, from 10,018 to 20,316.
- Context of use (table 8): 37.2% speak French only at school or at work, 26.6% speak English only in that setting, 38.7% speak Luxembourgish neither at home nor at work, 10% speak Portuguese only at home. The official portal luxembourg.public.lu confirms French as the first language at work, with a share ranging from 43% to 83% depending on the municipality, 67% in the capital.
Luxembourgish comes first, and four residents in ten speak it neither at home nor at work
With 61.2% of usual speakers, Luxembourgish remains the most spoken language in the country. The same census shows that 38.7% of respondents use it in neither context, and that its share as main language lost 6.9 points in ten years under the effect of immigration. Geography matters too: the official portal puts its use at work between 69% and 95% outside the capital, and between 30% and 56% around Luxembourg City.
For a campaign, Luxembourgish is essential when the target is long-established or local: neighbourhood retail, municipalities, associations, public bodies, services for settled families. It reaches few recent arrivals, only a small part of whom know it on arrival, according to the authors of the study.
French carries the workplace, English grows with new arrivals
French is usually spoken by half of the residents, and for a good third of them only at work or at school. It is the common language of professional life, which makes it the base language of a B2B campaign or a services website. English has a quarter of usual speakers, up 27% in ten years, and the official portal ranks it second at work, concentrated in finance, banking, insurance and international trade.
A message in French and English covers most professional situations. It leaves out part of the households: Portuguese is spoken at home by 10% of respondents without ever being used at work, and 12.4% use it in both contexts. German follows the opposite path, spoken at work or at school by close to a quarter of respondents, and in both contexts by only 6.7%; the portal places it mainly in healthcare, public administration, industry and retail.
What these figures change in the settings of a campaign
Ad platforms do not target the census languages. Google Ads uses the language of the interface and of the queries, Meta that of the profile and of activity. The census works upstream: deciding how many languages to produce, in which order, with what share of budget, and which sector to start with. A home insurance campaign, a household matter, gains from existing in Portuguese; a financial services offer, an office matter, in English and French first.
Two limits to keep in mind. The census describes residents; cross-border workers employed in the country are not in it, and a campaign geotargeted on Luxembourg reaches them every day nonetheless. Then, usually speaking a language and understanding an ad are two different things: the authors of the study say so, and the response rate to the question on spoken languages fell from 90% to 74% between the two censuses. The percentages give orders of magnitude; measuring a real campaign language by language gives the decision.
AIxH's view
We choose the languages of a campaign from these distributions, then we measure each language separately. The home insurance campaign for AXA Luxembourg was adapted into 20 languages to cover 95% of the resident population, well beyond the six languages of table 6, with click-through rates that reached 12% on some languages, a figure that is not an average. For MONDORF Domaine Thermal, the image tags were produced in French, German and English, each approved by a human. Our approach to multilingual SEO and our Social Ads campaigns rest on the same principle: generative AI produces the variants for each language, a person who speaks that language approves every version, and results are read language by language. If you currently advertise in a single language in Luxembourg, the first question to ask is what share of your customers lives and works in another.
