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Lower Sorbian language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
Please help improve this article or section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. (September 2007) |
| Lower Sorbian Dolnoserbski, Dolnoserbšćina |
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|---|---|---|
| Pronunciation: | [ˈdɔlnɔˌsɛrskʲi] | |
| Spoken in: | Germany | |
| Region: | Brandenburg | |
| Total speakers: | 14,000 | |
| Language family: | Indo-European Balto-Slavic Slavic West Slavic Sorbian Lower Sorbian |
|
| Writing system: | Latin (Sorbian variant) | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | none | |
| ISO 639-2: | dsb | |
| ISO 639-3: | dsb | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
Lower Sorbian (Dolnoserbski) is a Slavic minority language spoken in eastern Germany in the historical province of Lower Lusatia, today part of Brandenburg. It is one of the two literary Sorbian languages, the other being Upper Sorbian. Being similar with each other, the Lower Sorbian tends a bit to the Polish language, the Upper Sorbian a bit to the Czech Language.
Lower Sorbian is spoken in and around the city of Cottbus in Brandenburg. Signs in this region are usually bilingual, and Cottbus has a Gymnasium where the language of instruction is Lower Sorbian.
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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 [ʁ] instead of the alveolar trill [r], and a "clear" [l] that is not especially palatalized instead of [lʲ]. In villages and rural areas German influence is less marked, and the pronunciation is more "typically Slavic".
The consonant phonemes of Lower Sorbian are as follows:
| Bilabial | Labiodental | Dental | Alveolar | Alveolo-palatal | Postalveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stop | p b pʲ bʲ |
t d | k g kʲ gʲ |
||||||
| Affricate | ts | tɕ dʑ | tʃ dʒ | ||||||
| Nasal | m mʲ |
n | nʲ | ||||||
| Fricative | f v fʲ vʲ |
s z | ɕ ʑ | ʃ ʒ | x | h | |||
| Approximant | r rʲ |
j | |||||||
| Lateral approximant | lʲ |
Lower Sorbian has both final devoicing and regressive voicing assimilation:
- /dub/ "oak" is pronounced [dup]
- /susedka/ "(female) neighbor" is pronounced [susetka]
- /litsba/ "number" is pronounced [lidzba]
The postalveolar fricative /ʃ/ is assimilated to [ɕ] before /tɕ/:
- /ʃtɕit/ "protection" is pronounced [ɕtɕit]
The vowel phonemes are as follows:
| Monophthongs | Front | Central | Back |
|---|---|---|---|
| Close | i | ɨ | u |
| Open-mid | ɛ | ɔ | |
| Open | a | ||
| Diphthongs | Centering | Ending in /j/ |
Ending in /w/ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starting close | iɪ | ij ɨj uj | iw ɨw uw |
| Starting mid | ej ɔj | ɛw ow | |
| Starting open | aj | aw |
Stress in Lower Sorbian normally falls on the first syllable of the word:
In loanwords, stress may fall on any of the last three syllables:
- internat /intɛrˈnat/ "boarding school"
- kontrola /kɔnˈtrɔlʲa/ "control"
- september /sɛpˈtɛmbɛr/ "September"
- policija /pɔˈlʲitsija/ "police"
- organizacija /ɔrganʲiˈzatsija/ "organization"
The Sorbian alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet but uses diacritics such as acute accent and caron. The standard character encoding for the Lower Sorbian alphabet is ISO 8859-2 (Latin-2).
- Lower Sorbian language at Ethnologue
- (German)(Lower Sorbian)Delnjoserbski radio program (Real audio)
- (German)(Lower Sorbian)at dolnoserbski.de
- (German)(Lower Sorbian)at SorbWord
- (German)(Lower Sorbian)at Korpus GENIE
- (German)(Lower Sorbian)Lexikalische Übungen
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| West Slavic | Czech · Kashubian · Knaanic† · Lower Sorbian · Pannonian Rusyn · Polabian† · Polish · Pomeranian† · Slovak · Slovincian† · Upper Sorbian |
| East Slavic | Belarusian · Old East Slavic† · Old Novgorod dialect† · Russian · Carpathian Rusyn · Ruthenian† · Ukrainian |
| South Slavic | Banat Bulgarian · Bulgarian · Church Slavonic · Macedonian · Old Church Slavonic† · Central South Slavic (Bosnian, Bunjevac, Croatian, Montenegrin, Serbian, Šokac) · Slavic (Greece) · Slovenian |
| Other | Proto-Slavic† · Russenorsk† · Slavoserbian† |
| (†) denotes Extinct | |