Some scholars use it to refer to the entire group of West Central German dialects spoken in the French Lorraine region.

[citation needed] The German term Lothringisch refers to Rhine Franconian spoken in Lorraine.

[4] In part due to the ambiguity of the term, estimates of the number of Lorraine Franconian speakers in France vary widely, ranging from 30,000[5] to 400,000[6] (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 the current situation (see Languages in France for discussion of this survey).

About 78,000 people were reported to speak Lorraine Franconian, but fewer than 50,000 passed basic knowledge of the language on to their children.