New Speakers in the City

Serbske Nowiny is the only newspaper published daily in the Sorbian language. Below is an article that appeared in the newspaper on April 8th 2021. It is about the panel that we offered as a team at the XVIII International Conference on Minority Languages, organized online by the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, as well as about the interview conducted with Joanna by Cordula Ratajczak right after the conference.

La question de l’authenticité linguistique a déjà beaucoup fait parler d’elle. Elle valoriserait un « locuteur natif idéal » qui emploierait la langue de façon irréfléchie, spontanée et compétente et s’opposerait à l’inauthenticité du locuteur non natif, ayant appris la langue hors du contexte familial. On constate alors un discours authentique romancé qui, comme le soulignait le linguiste Martin Gill, s’appuie sur des qualificatifs tels que « natif, oral, mot pour mot, spontané, non-officiel, sincère, vernaculaire et dialectal ». Ces représentations invitent ici à s’interroger sur les acteurs de cette fabrique de l’authenticité linguistique. Qui a le pouvoir de faire cette distinction ? Et qui peut valider ces revendications d’authenticité ? Cette conférence vise ainsi à éloigner la discussion de l’aspect purement linguistique lorsque l’on considère le locuteur « authentique » ou « légitime », afin d’étudier ce concept dans une perspective plus centrée sur le locute...

We are happy to announce the launch of a Wiki on Lower Sorbian in Germany within Mercator's Wiki on minority language learning. The Wiki can be accessed here . Work on the Wiki was made possible by the funding from the Polish National Science Centre , grant no. NCN OPUS 162018/31/B/HS2/00844. Map credit: Šewc, Hinc (1968) Gramatika hornjoserbskeje rěče, 1. zwjazk. Budyšin: Ludowe nakładnistwo Domowina.  https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorbische_Sprache#/media/Datei:Sorbische_Dialekte.png

Nowy Casnik, the Lower Sorbian weekly with headquarters in Cottbus, has published an article about Joanna, her fieldwork in Lower Lusatia and our project in the 49th issue (beginning of December 2020). You can see it here:

Sorbian-oriented research is institutionally represented by the Serbski institut in Bautzen/Budyšin (Sorbian Institute) and the Institute for Sorbian Studies  (Institut für Sorabistik) at the University of Leipzig. The Sorbian Institute includes the Sorbian Central Library and the Sorbian culture archive. The institute cooperates with partners in Germany and with universities in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Russia. The institute also cooperates with the International Slavists Committee, the European Research Institute for Culture in Bonn and the European Bureau for Lesser-Used Languages in Dublin (Mercator 2016: 48). “The Sorbian Institute edits Lětopis , a scientific journal that appears twice a year and additionally has special editions” (Mercator 2016: 19).  The main Sorbian scientific society is Maśica Serbska (spelled Maćica Serbska in Upper Sorbian), founded in Bautzen/Budyšin in 1847. With its 120 members in both Lower and Upper Lusatia, voluntarily active...

Following an intensive literature review process and the first fact-finding fieldwork in Lower Lusatia in July-August 2020, we have compiled the first project report that is now available for download here . The report offers a concise summary of the information on the Lower Sorbian language from the sociolinguistic perspective and on the ethnic group of Lower Sorbs living in the East of Germany to be found in various publications in English, German and Polish. Most of these texts (the most important being, among others, Glaser 2007 and Mercator 2016 in English, Marti 1990 and publications by Budarjowa, Elle, or Neumann in German, Dołowy-Rybińska 2012, 2014 and Lewaszkiewicz 2014 in Polish, as well as the publications within the framework of the SMiLE project) focus on both Lower and Upper Sorbs/Sorbian languages. In general, Upper Sorbian has received more scholarly attention and is better documented than Lower Sorbian. Although also endangered, Upper Sorbian is in a slightly better “...

GIDS is a Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale framework developed by Joshua Fishman (1991). The framework includes eight stages 1-8, which should be read from the bottom up, assuming that stage 1 is the ideal be strived for and that revitalization of an endangered language usually starts at one of the lower stages:  1. Education, work sphere, mass media and government operations at higher and national levels; 2. Local/regional mass media and governance; 3. Local/regional work sphere; 4. Public schooling; 5. Schools for literacy acquisition, not in the public schooling system (incl. courses for adults); 6. Home-family-neighbourhood language use and transmission; 7. Cultural interaction in the given language involving primarily the older generations; 8. Language reconstruction and adult acquisition.  Except for a handful of committed language activists, Lower Sorbian does not have a closely-knit speech community. Young people, even if they learn it at school, can rarely ho...