Lower Sorbian language

Lower Sorbian (endonym: dolnoserbšćina) is a West Slavic minority language spoken in eastern Germany in the historical province of Lower Lusatia, today part of Brandenburg.

Standard Lower Sorbian is one of the two literary Sorbian languages, 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 differs from Upper Sorbian at all levels of the language system: in phonetics (the spread of the plosive consonant g; the merger of the affricate č with the hardened fricative c; the change of hard r after p, t, k into hard š; the change of ć, ʒ́ into soft fricative sibilants ś, ź), in morphology (the presence of the supine; absence of aorist and imperfect forms in dialects), and in vocabulary (bom "tree"; twarc "carpenter"; gluka "happiness" and so on, contrasted with the corresponding Upper Sorbian štom, ćěsla, zbožo). The formation of the Lower Sorbian literary norm was greatly influenced by the Upper Sorbian language. Unlike Upper Sorbian, Lower Sorbian is less standardized and strictly codified, characterized by instability and greater variability.

Lower Sorbian is spoken in and around the city of Cottbus in Brandenburg. 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. Most native speakers today belong to the older generations. The younger and middle generations only know the learned literary language, with German being their native language. The assimilation process in Lower Lusatia has reached such a level that one can speak of a threat to the existence of the Lower Sorbian language.

A writing system based on the Latin alphabet was created in the 16th century. The first grammar of the language in history was written in 1650 by the Lutheran pastor Jan Hoinan. The regulator of the literary language is the Lower Sorbian Language Commission, currently operating under the Sorbian cultural and educational society Matica serbska.

The modern Lower Sorbian dialects developed on the basis of Proto-Slavic dialects whose speakers, by the 6th–7th centuries, had occupied extensive territories on the western periphery of the Slavic linguistic area — in the middle course of the Elbe, from the Oder in the east to the Saale in the west. The early beginning of the expansion of the German language led to the assimilation of the Slavic dialects over a significant part of the ancient Lusatian area. Only a small portion of the territory where the Old Sorbian dialects were spoken has survived to the present day — Lower Sorbian dialects in the area of the Lusici tribe, and Upper Sorbian dialects in the area of the Milceni tribe.

The Sorbs never had their own statehood. For a long time, the alliance of Lusatian Serb tribes resisted German aggression and even went on the offensive, invading Frankish lands and devastating them. Nevertheless, in the 10th century the Sorbian tribal alliance was finally defeated, and the Slavic population fell under German rule. From the late 10th century onwards, for an entire millennium, the Sorbian linguistic area lay within various German-speaking states or their administrative units. This became the main reason for the gradual Germanization of the Sorbian population. Germanization in Lusatia varied in time and intensity, sometimes taking a natural course, sometimes being coercive. The result was the narrowing of the sphere of Sorbian dialect use to mainly oral everyday communication, their gradual displacement from towns into rural areas, and the shrinking of the Sorbian area almost to the point of disappearance today.

In the 13th–15th centuries, significant changes to the ethnolinguistic map of Sorbian territory were caused by a period of internal colonization. German settlers founded new villages; the Sorbs became a minority among the numerically dominant German-speaking population and gradually lost their native language, adopting German. The Sorbian linguistic area was greatly reduced, and many Slavic territories — including a number of peripheral districts of Lower Lusatia — became German-speaking. The urban population spoke German; Sorbian dialects were used mainly in the villages. At the same time, population growth and the founding of new settlements, especially in the 13th century, led to the formation of a compact Sorbian-speaking area within what is now Lower and Upper Lusatia.

Until the 16th century, the rural population of Lower Lusatia was almost entirely Sorbian; only after the Reformation did the number of Sorbs begin to decline while the German population grew. German–Sorbian bilingualism spread in different ways across districts, towns, and villages. The process was faster in peripheral areas, slower around Cottbus. Sorbs in towns were quickly Germanized; the process was slower in suburbs and slowest in villages. Until the late 18th century, Sorbian dialects remained the main means of communication for the peasantry, with German being only a second language in villages. Until the mid-16th century, the functions of the Sorbian dialects were limited mainly to oral communication within the family; they were used to a limited extent in courts (for giving testimony, though it was recorded in German), in church practice (for oral translation from German into Sorbian), and in communications from the authorities to the population.