The Wendish Research Exchange - Kaulfürst, Fabian: Dialectal Vocabulary in Muka’s Dictionary of the Lower Sorbian Language and its Dialects

Lětopis Abstract 2012 2: Kaulfürst, Fabian: Dialectal Vocabulary in Muka’s Dictionary of the Lower Sorbian Language and its Dialects

For this article all entries marked as dialectal were assembled and analysed from the digitalised version of A. Muka’s dictionary. This was made more difficult by the fact that a relatively high variation in qualifiers can be noted. Just on 4,600 entries are assigned to individual dialects; to these can be added numerous combined and more general regional features. Lexemes from transitional and peripheral Lower Sorbian dialects, which deviate from the standard language, provide the main body of entries in the dialectal dictionary. Particularly valuable for historical dialectology are the numerous entries from the Spremberg and Spreewald dialects, which could only be recorded partly in the Sorbian Language Atlas because of the advanced level of code-switching to German. In addition, systematic phonetical and morphological dialectal features are discussed in the article, which can be deduced from the lexical material recorded in the dictionary.