The Wendish Research Exchange - Wölkowa, Sonja: Upper Sorbian Language Use in the Internet

Lětopis Abstract 2008 1: Wölkowa, Sonja: Upper Sorbian Language Use in the Internet

The subject of this piece is the idiomatic language actively used by speakers of Upper Sorbian. The source material is the language used in both (predominately Upper Sorbian) Sorbian-language Internet forums: www.interserb.de and www.internecy.de. This selection allows access to texts, which are produced predominantly by young people and at the same time are close to everyday spoken language. In total 691 instances of the use of 465 idioms are considered. The language corpus, which is established, shows that German language use plays a fundamental role in the active use of Upper Sorbian idioms. Above all, idioms are used which have formal equivalents in German; there are also numerous examples of loan translations and hybrid formations of German origin.