mersiowsky - 10-6-2016 at 01:29 PM
Lětopis Abstract 2013 1: Thorquindt-Stumpf, Kamil and Hauke Bartels: A New Sound and Text Archive of Mother-Tongue Lower Sorbian Dialects
The article presents the aims and methodology of a new research project designed to document Lower Sorbian. The object of the plan is to provide sound
recordings of older speakers, mostly over the age of seventy today, who acquired a dialect of Lower Sorbian as their mother tongue in the first half
of the 20th Century. It is expected that because of the present language situation this primary form of Lower Sorbian, also informally called the
vernacular, in Lower Sorbian “ludowa rěc,” will cease to exist in future. A documentation of the language is therefore urgently needed. The audio
recordings produced in the project will in addition be transcribed and translated into German, partly also into English. The data will subsequently
become part of the “Language Archive,” which collects and archives information on endangered languages worldwide. They will also provide the basis for
further research into Lower Sorbian. The project, which is scheduled to last for 3 to 4 years, will be financed by the Volkswagen Foundation as part
of its programme of support for the “Documentation of Endangered Languages.”