The Wendish Research Exchange - Bartels, Hauke and Fabian Kaulfürst, Marcin Szczepański, Sonja Wölke: The Monitoring of Sorbian Literature. Theoretical

Lětopis Abstract 2021 1: Bartels, Hauke and Fabian Kaulfürst, Marcin Szczepański, Sonja Wölke: The Monitoring of Sorbian Literature. Theoretical Bases and the First Yearly Report of a new Research Project

This article presents the research report for a new, long-term project of the Sorbian Institute, in which an essential part of all Sorbian printed literature, which has appeared in a calendar year, is processed in digital form into corpus texts of high value, – starting with the year 2019; it is then subsequently examined with regard to the vocabulary used in it. The background, methodology and goals of the research project are then explained. Alongside this, this article represents the first-year report, which presents the results of the analyses of the corpus texts beginning in 2020. As well as presenting a current picture of the lexicon used in the latest literature, which involves the identification of “new words” and a perspective on the changes in the vocabulary of Upper and Lower Sorbian, this new monitoring process offers an enormous potential for linguistic science in Sorbian studies, as it is in particular looking for a synchronic and up-to-date description of both modern Sorbian literary languages, but also, in the long term, looking for manifestations of language change.