Easy language is a deliberately simplified form of written language, developed so that information stays usable by people who find standard administrative or journalistic prose hard going. Luxembourg being Luxembourg, it travels under three names: Liicht Sprooch in Luxembourgish, Leichte Sprache in German, and facile à lire et à comprendre (FALC) in French.
The subject is spread thin here. Guidance exists, but it sits in different institutions, in different languages, and is hard to find at the moment you actually need it. liichtsprooch.lu gives it one address.
Who it is for
Easy language is often filed under disability, and that is only part of it. It helps:
- people who find reading difficult, whatever the reason;
- people with an intellectual disability, for whom it is frequently the difference between having access to a piece of information and not having it;
- people reading in a language that is not their first, a large share of the population in this country;
- older readers, children and teenagers.
Which is to say: a text in easy language is not a text for a minority. It is a text more people can act on.
The rules, in short
Luxembourg follows the international guidelines: short sentences, plain words, explanations where an idea needs one, concrete examples, images and icons as support, a single form of a word rather than doubled variants, and no unexplained jargon. They already shape official material: public administration texts on Guichet.lu and crisis information on Infocrise.lu among them.
Tools that make it practical
The site collects what is actually usable rather than only what is theoretically correct: the pictogram sets from POINT Project and from Klaro's toolbox, the German plain-language translation tool einfachesprache.xyz, and the training courses Klaro runs through UFEP, INAP and IFEN.
What gets published
- Publications. New guides and materials as they appear: a Luxembourgish-language easy-read guide, a FALC folder of accessible tourism and culture offers, a plain-language guide for the financial sector.
- Organisations. Who works on easy language here, and how they are set up: competence centres, news services publishing in easy language, education.
- Technology. Where automated and AI-assisted simplification stands, including Accessilingua and the French Cap'FALC project, useful and worth watching closely rather than trusting blindly.
Where it is heading
Easy language is spreading through administrative forms, public health and safety information, schools, museums and libraries, and increasingly through election material and political programmes, the last of which matters more than it sounds, because a citizen who cannot read the programme cannot really vote on it. Expect more digital resources, more trained professionals, and more of it written into law.