Featured photo: View of the city of Cottbus at sunset by Teodor Bordeianu
The Sorbian languages are a pair of minority languages, Upper Sorbian and Lower Sorbian, which are spoken in the Lusatia region in eastern Germany.
- These languages are spoken by the Sorbs, a Slavic minority in the country.
- Lower Sorbian is spoken in and around the city of Cottbus.
- Upper Sorbian is focused in and around Bautzen.
- Both languages are officially recognized minority languages and therefore are protected under the German government.
- Between the two languages, there are approximately 55,000 speakers.
The Sorbian languages belong to the West Slavic branch of Indo-European languages.
- Other West Slavic languages include Czech, Slovak, Polish, Silesian, and Kashubian.
- All West Slavic languages are written using a form of Latin script.
Both Upper and Lower Sorbian use the dual form, which applies to nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verbs.
- This usage is rare among living Indo-European languages.
- Examples of other languages that use the dual are Arabic (an Afro-Asiatic language) and the Sami languages (part of the Uralic language family).
- The usage of the dual means that the plural is only used to refer to three or more.
Lower Sorbian declines in six cases – nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, instrumental, and locative.
- These are the same six cases also used in Russian.
Upper Sorbian declines in seven cases – the six cases mentioned above plus the vocative case.
- Another language that uses these exact seven cases is Polish.
Here is an example of what Upper Sorbian sounds like:
Now for a sample of Lower Sorbian:
For more resources for the Sorbian languages, visit this page.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorbian_languages
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/sorbian.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_(grammatical_number)#Languages_with_dual_number
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