Lower Sorbian () is a West Slavic

minority language A minority language is a language spoken by a minority of the population of a territory. Such people are termed linguistic minorities or language minorities. With a total number of 196 sovereign states recognized internationally (as of 2019) and ...

spoken in eastern

Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...

in the historical province of

Lower Lusatia Lower Lusatia (; ; ; ; ) is a historical region in Central Europe, stretching from the southeast of the Germany, German state of Brandenburg to the southwest of Lubusz Voivodeship in Poland. Like adjacent Upper Lusatia in the south, Lower Lusa ...

, today part of

Brandenburg Brandenburg, officially the State of Brandenburg, is a States of Germany, state in northeastern Germany. Brandenburg borders Poland and the states of Berlin, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Lower Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Saxony. It is the List of Ger ...

. Standard Lower Sorbian is one of the two literary

Sorbian languages The Sorbian languages (, ) are the Upper Sorbian language and Lower Sorbian language, two closely related and partially mutually intelligible languages spoken by the Sorbs, a West Slavs, West Slavic ethno-cultural minority in the Lusatia region ...

, the other being the more widely spoken Upper Sorbian. The Lower Sorbian literary standard was developed in the 18th century, based on a southern form of the Cottbus dialect. The standard variety of Lower Sorbian has received structural influence from Upper Sorbian. Lower Sorbian is spoken in and around the city of

Cottbus Cottbus () or (;) is a university city and the second-largest city in the German state of Brandenburg after the state capital, Potsdam. With around 100,000 inhabitants, Cottbus is the most populous city in Lusatia. Cottbus lies in the Sorbian ...

. Signs in this region are typically bilingual, and Cottbus has a '' Lower Sorbian Gymnasium'' where one language of instruction is Lower Sorbian. It is a heavily

endangered language An endangered language or moribund language is a language that is at risk of disappearing as its speakers die out or shift to speaking other languages. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers and becomes a " dead langua ...

. Most native speakers today belong to the older generations.

Phonology

The phonology of Lower Sorbian has been greatly influenced by contact with German, especially in Cottbus and larger towns. For example, German-influenced pronunciation tends to have a

voiced uvular fricative The voiced uvular fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some Speech communication, spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , an inverted small uppercase letter , or in broad t ...

instead of the alveolar trill . In villages and rural areas, German influence is less marked, and the pronunciation is more "typically Slavic".

Consonants

* are bilabial, whereas are

labiodental In phonetics, labiodentals are consonants articulated with the lower lip and the upper teeth, such as and . In English, labiodentalized /s/, /z/ and /r/ are characteristic of some individuals; these may be written . Labiodental consonants in ...

, are labiovelar, although the latter may be a labial–palatal approximant. * Consonants in parentheses are allophones of another consonant before another consonant or vowel, for example may palatalize to before front vowels or , and may assimilate to before velar consonants. * The

Proto-Slavic Proto-Slavic (abbreviated PSl., PS.; also called Common Slavic or Common Slavonic) is the unattested, reconstructed proto-language of all Slavic languages. It represents Slavic speech approximately from the 2nd millennium BC through the 6th ...

contrasts between and their palatalized counterparts has been lost phonetically in Lower Sorbian, with the marginal phonemes occurring only before certain vowels. The contrasts between and their palatalized counterparts has evolved into a contrast between and . The contrast between and its palatalized counterpart has evolved into a contrast between while the contrasts between and their palatalized counterparts has remained intact and the contrasts between and their palatalized counterparts no longer exists. * are alveolar , whereas are dental . * have been variously transcribed with and . Their actual phonetic realization is flat postalveolar in all of the Lower Sorbian-speaking area. This is unlike in standard Upper Sorbian, where these are

palato-alveolar Postalveolar (post-alveolar) consonants are consonants articulated with the tongue near or touching the ''back'' of the alveolar ridge. Articulation is farther back in the mouth than the alveolar consonants, which are at the ridge itself, but n ...

Final devoicing and assimilation

Lower Sorbian has both final devoicing and regressive voicing assimilation: *''dub'' "oak" is pronounced *''susedka'' "(female) neighbor" is pronounced *''licba'' "number" is pronounced The hard postalveolar fricative is assimilated to before : *''šćit'' "protection" is pronounced

Vowels

The vowel inventory of Lower Sorbian is exactly the same as that of Upper Sorbian. It is also very similar to the vowel inventory of Slovene. * is retracted to after hard consonants. * are diphthongized to in slow speech. * The and distinctions are weakened or lost in unstressed syllables. * is phonetically central .

Stress

Stress in Lower Sorbian normally falls on the first

syllable A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are ...

of the word: * "

Lusatia Lusatia (; ; ; ; ; ), otherwise known as Sorbia, is a region in Central Europe, formerly entirely in Germany and today territorially split between Germany and modern-day Poland. Lusatia stretches from the Bóbr and Kwisa rivers in the eas ...

" * "friend" * "

" In

loanword A loanword (also a loan word, loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language (the recipient or target language), through the process of borrowing. Borrowing is a metaphorical term t ...

s, stress may fall on any of the last three syllables: * "boarding school" * "control" * "September" * "police" * "organization" Most one-syllable prepositions attract the stress to themselves when they precede a noun or pronoun of one or two syllables: * "on the courtyard" * "near me" * "into the city" (the of becomes when unstressed) However, nouns of three or more syllables retain their stress: * "in front of the teacher" * "on a journey"

Orthography

The Sorbian alphabet is based on the

Latin script The Latin script, also known as the Roman script, is a writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae in Magna Graecia. The Gree ...

but uses

diacritic A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacrit ...

s such as the

acute accent The acute accent (), , is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin alphabet, Latin, Cyrillic script, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabet, Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accen ...

and

caron A caron or háček ( ), is a diacritic mark () placed over certain letters in the orthography of some languages, to indicate a change of the related letter's pronunciation. Typographers tend to use the term ''caron'', while linguists prefer ...

Sample

Article 1 of the

Universal Declaration of Human Rights The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is an international document adopted by the United Nations General Assembly that enshrines the Human rights, rights and freedoms of all human beings. Drafted by a UN Drafting of the Universal D ...

in Lower Sorbian:

(All people are born free and equal in their dignity and rights. They are given reason and conscience and they shall create their relationships to one another according to the spirit of brotherhood.)Omniglot
/ref>

References

Bibliography

* * * * * *

External links

Online course for Lower and Upper Sorbian
(English, Sorbian, German)

( RealAudio)
Lower Sorbian Vocabulary List
(from the World Loanword Database)
Lower Sorbian DoReCo corpus
compiled by Hauke Bartels and Marcin Szczepański. Audio recordings of narrative texts, with transcriptions time-aligned at the phone level and translations.

Dictionaries