The Wendish Research Exchange - Thorquindt-Stumpf, Kamil and Hauke Bartels: A New Sound and Text Archive of Mother-Tongue Lower Sorbian Dialects

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.”