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The paper introduces LuxBorrow, a pipeline for analyzing language borrowing in Luxembourgish news articles from 1999-2025. It identifies borrowed words at the token level using language identification, lemmatization, a loanword registry, and morphological/orthographic rules. The analysis reveals that while Luxembourgish remains the dominant language, multilingualism is common, with French being the primary source of borrowed words and code-switching intensifying over time.
Luxembourgish news reveals a surge in code-switching and morphologically adapted borrowings, primarily from French, challenging simple document-level mixing indices.
We present LuxBorrow, a borrowing-first analysis of Luxembourgish (LU) news spanning 27 years (1999-2025), covering 259,305 RTL articles and 43.7M tokens. Our pipeline combines sentence-level language identification (LU/DE/FR/EN) with a token-level borrowing resolver restricted to LU sentences, using lemmatization, a collected loanword registry, and compiled morphological and orthographic rules. Empirically, LU remains the matrix language across all documents, while multilingual practice is pervasive: 77.1% of articles include at least one donor language and 65.4% use three or four. Breadth does not imply intensity: median code-mixing index (CMI) increases from 3.90 (LU+1) to only 7.00 (LU+3), indicating localized insertions rather than balanced bilingual text. Domain and period summaries show moderate but persistent mixing, with CMI rising from 6.1 (1999-2007) to a peak of 8.4 in 2020. Token-level adaptations total 25,444 instances and exhibit a mixed profile: morphological 63.8%, orthographic 35.9%, lexical 0.3%. The most frequent individual rules are orthographic, such as on->oun and eur->er, while morphology is collectively dominant. Diachronically, code-switching intensifies, and morphologically adapted borrowings grow from a small base. French overwhelmingly supplies adapted items, with modest growth for German and negligible English. We advocate borrowing-centric evaluation, including borrowed token and type rates, donor entropy over borrowed items, and assimilation ratios, rather than relying only on document-level mixing indices.
