Misplaced Pages

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 standard 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 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.

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

Consonants

• /m, mʲ, p, pʲ, b, bʲ/ are bilabial, whereas /f, v/ are labiodental, /w, wʲ/ 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 /m/ may palatalize to /mʲ/ before front vowels or /j/, and /n/ may assimilate to /ŋ/ before velar consonants.
• The Proto-Slavic contrasts between /m, p, b, v/ and their palatalized counterparts has been lost phonetically in Lower Sorbian, with the marginal phonemes occurring only before certain vowels. The contrasts between /t, d/ and their palatalized counterparts has evolved into a contrast between /t, d/ and /ɕ, ʑ/. The contrast between /l/ and its palatalized counterpart has evolved into a contrast between /w, l/ while the contrasts between /n, r/ and their palatalized counterparts has remained intact and the contrasts between /s, z/ and their palatalized counterparts no longer exists.
• /n, nʲ, l, r, rʲ/ are alveolar , whereas /t, d, t͡s, s, z/ are dental .
• /t͡ʃ, ʃ, ʒ/ have been variously transcribed with ⟨t͡ʃ, ʃ, ʒ⟩ and ⟨t͡ʂ, ʂ, ʐ⟩. 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 .

Final devoicing and assimilation

Lower Sorbian has both final devoicing and regressive voicing assimilation:

• dub /dub/ "oak" is pronounced
• susedka /ˈsusedka/ "(female) neighbor" is pronounced
• licba /ˈlit͡sba/ "number" is pronounced

The hard postalveolar fricative /ʃ/ is assimilated to before /t͡ɕ/:

• šćit /ʃt͡ɕit/ "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.

• /i/ is retracted to after hard consonants.
• /e, o/ are diphthongized to in slow speech.
• The /e–ɛ/ and /o–ɔ/ distinctions are weakened or lost in unstressed syllables.
• /a/ is phonetically central [ä].

Stress

Stress in Lower Sorbian normally falls on the first syllable of the word:

• Łužyca "Lusatia"
• pśijaśel "friend"
• Chóśebuz "Cottbus"

In loanwords, stress may fall on any of the last three syllables:

• internat "boarding school"
• kontrola "control"
• september "September"
• policija "police"
• organizacija "organization"

Most one-syllable prepositions attract the stress to themselves when they precede a noun or pronoun of one or two syllables:

• na dwórje "on the courtyard"
• pśi mnjo "near me"
• do města "into the city" (the of město becomes when unstressed)

However, nouns of three or more syllables retain their stress:

• pśed wucabnikom "in front of the teacher"
• na drogowanju "on a journey"

Orthography

This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (August 2024)

The Sorbian alphabet is based on the Latin script but uses diacritics such as the acute accent and caron.

Sample

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Lower Sorbian:

Wšykne luźe su lichotne roźone a jadnake po dostojnosći a pšawach. Woni maju rozym a wědobnosć a maju ze sobu w duchu bratšojstwa wobchadaś. (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.)

See also

• Upper Sorbian language

References

1. Lower Sorbian at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
2. ^ Björn Rothstein, Rolf Thieroff (2010). Mood in the Languages of Europe. John Benjamins Publishing. pp. 376–377. ISBN 9789027205872.
3. Moseley, Christopher, ed. (2010). Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger (3rd ed.). Paris: UNESCO Publishing. ISBN 978-92-3-104096-2.
4. ^ Stone (2002), p. 605.
5. Zygis (2003), pp. 180–181.
6. Niedersorbische Aussprache, Serbski Institut
7. Iskarous, Khalil, and Kavitskaya, Darya, Sound Change and the Structure of Synchronic Variability: Phonetic and Phonological Factors in Slavic Palatalization (PDF), Linguistic Society of America{{citation}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
8. Hannusch (1998).
9. Stone (2002).
10. Zygis (2003).
11. This transcription follows Laver (1994:251–252). Other scholars may transcribe these sounds differently.
12. Zygis (2003), pp. 180–181, 190–191.
13. Šewc-Schuster (1984), pp. 40–41. sfnp error: no target: CITEREFŠewc-Schuster1984 (help)
14. Hannusch (1998), p. 12.
15. Hannusch (1998), p. 13.
16. ^ Stone (2002), p. 600.
17. Stone (2002), pp. 606–607.
18. ^ Hannusch (1998), p. 14.
19. Omniglot

Bibliography

• Hannusch, Erwin (1998), Niedersorbisch praktisch und verständlich, Bautzen: Domowina-Verlag, ISBN 3-7420-1667-9
• Howson, Phil (2017), "Foreign language acquisition of perceptually similar segments: evidence from Lower Sorbian", Open Research Europe, 3: 56, doi:10.12688/openreseurope.14895.2, PMC 10964000, PMID 38532923
• Laver, John (1994), Principles of Phonetics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-45655-X
• Schuster-Šewc, Heinz (1984), Gramatika hornjoserbskeje rěče, Budyšin: Ludowe nakładnistwo Domowina
• Stone, Gerald (2002), "Sorbian (Upper and Lower)", in Comrie, Bernard; Corbett, Greville G. (eds.), The Slavonic Languages, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 593–685, ISBN 9780415280785
• Zygis, Marzena (2003), "Phonetic and Phonological Aspects of Slavic Sibilant Fricatives" (PDF), ZAS Papers in Linguistics, 3: 175–213, doi:10.21248/zaspil.32.2003.191, archived from the original (PDF) on 2017-10-11, retrieved 2015-04-21

External links

• Online course for Lower and Upper Sorbian (English, Sorbian, German)
• Dolnoserbski radio program (RealAudio) (in German and Lower Sorbian)
• 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

Czech-Lower Sorbian and Lower Sorbian-Czech

• Slovník DolnoLužická Srbština <=> Čeština (in Czech and Lower Sorbian)

German–Lower Sorbian

• Deutsch-Niedersorbisches Wörterbuch at dolnoserbski.de (in German and Lower Sorbian)
• Korpus GENIE – GEsprochenes NIEdersorbisch/Wendisch (in German and Lower Sorbian)

Lower Sorbian–German

• Dolnoserbsko-nimske słowniki at dolnoserbski.de] (in German and Lower Sorbian)
• Lexikalische Übungen und Terminologie at the Universität Leipzig (in German and Lower Sorbian)

• Lower Sorbian language
• Endangered Slavic languages
• Languages of Germany
• Sorbian languages
• West Slavic languages
• Slavic languages written in Latin script