Projekt

Lower Sorbian is a West Slavonic language which has been spoken for about 1400 years in what is now the German Federal State of Brandenburg. Today it is one of the most endangered European minority languages. The aim of the project is to develop a text corpus of native Lower Sorbian based on transcriptions of audio recordings from various sources. Alongside the assessment and selection of pre-existing recordings an important task will be the extensive collection of new original recordings. Here the primary focus will be on dialect speakers of the older generation who often still learned Lower Sorbian as a first language or at least as a second language directly from their parents. (The intergeneration language transmission was interrupted by the 1950s at the latest.) But the main task will be the transcription and translation of the respective material. The project will achieve a considerable increase in audio material of native Lower Sorbian and a substantial broadening of the database available for language documentation and further research. The corpus will be part of the electronic archive at the Max-Planck-Institute in Nijmegen.

• Dr. Hauke Bartels

  Sorbisches Institut e.V.
  Zweigstelle für Niedersorbische
  Forschungen
  Cottbus