LOWER SORBIAN LANGUAGE

'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.

Contents

Phonology

Consonants

Vowels

Stress

Orthography

External links

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 , and a "clear" that is not especially palatalized instead of . In villages and rural areas German influence is less marked, and the pronunciation is more "typically Slavic".

Consonants

The consonant phonemes of Lower Sorbian are as follows:

	Bilabial	Labiodental	Dental	Alveolar	Alveolo-palatal	Postalveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
'Stop'
'Affricate'
'Nasal'
'Fricative'
'Approximant'
'Lateral approximant'

Lower Sorbian has both final devoicing and regressive voicing assimilation:

★ "oak" is pronounced

★ "(female) neighbor" is pronounced

★ "number" is pronounced
The postalveolar fricative is assimilated to before :

★ "protection" is pronounced

Vowels

The vowel phonemes are as follows:

Monophthongs	Front	Central	Back
'Close'
'Open-mid'
'Open'

Diphthongs	Centering	Ending in	Ending in
'Starting close'
'Starting mid'
'Starting open'

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"

Orthography

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).

External links

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