Two expat children who attend a Luxembourgish primary school have spent the entirety of their Easter vacation being forced to perform degrading linguistic tricks for family members back home, it has been revealed.

The children, a 10-year-old boy and his 12-year-old sister whose relatives are monolingual and easily impressed by those who are not, say they are exhausted after the ordeal.

"It all started innocently enough with our grandfather pointing to different things like a fork or bread roll and asking how to say them in Luxembourgish, French, German, or whatever," said the boy, who has vowed to never again make the eight-hour trip to his parents' home country.

"But then our grandmother started making us say whole sentences, sing songs, or tell jokes — in languages she doesn't even understand," added his sister, who has vowed to glue her mouth shut during the next visit.

The degree of humiliation only grew as days passed and more extended family members paid visits to marvel at the linguistic acrobatics, according to sources.

The children were given increasingly complex situations to act out, such as a bus driver apologising in Luxembourgish to a group of elderly German-speaking tourists for having accidentally sent them to a pig farm in the north of the country instead of the Grand Ducal Palace.

Or, a French-speaking lion tamer trying to explain to a German-speaking butcher why he needs pieces of beef that are leaner so as to more closely resemble gazelle meat.

"The last straw was when Uncle Jo-Jo asked us to perform a trilingual skit in which the ghost of Marlene Dietrich, speaking German, and a drunken Gérard Depardieu, speaking slurred French, get into an argument about the best place to to eat mussels in Brussels — when Jean-Claude Juncker shows up and puts an end to the discussion by insulting them both in working-class Luxembourgish slang and explaining in more formal Luxembourgish that the best mussels are found at a dingy underground seafood bar in Ostend" said the boy.

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